How is Affect Related to the Social?

Eliza Steinbock

Eliza Steinbock is Associate Professor of Gender and Diversity Studies at Maastricht University, the Netherlands.

This essay by Eliza Steinbock focuses on the question: How is affect related to the social? Steinbock describes the analytical frameworks propagated by affect studies that are useful for those concerned with social justice.

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Affect; embodied experience; microphysics of power; theory-in-the-flesh; Zanele Muholi

As sentient beings, we each have the capacity to affect and to be affected, an insight phrased by philosopher Baruch Spinoza in the seventeenth century that has spawned numerous treatises exploring what affections the body is capable of. Philosopher Gilles Deleuze extends this tradition in his 1968 book on Spinoza and the problem of expressionism, taking his idea that ‘No one has yet determined what the body can do’ to set the course for affective approaches that seek out its radical liberatory possibilities. Affect is at the heart of art because art is routinely defined as a mode of being expressive of experience, feeling, sensation, and emotion that finds meaning and content in an artistic form. Because affect is so broadly applicable to art, it is not always discussed in explicit terms outside of research on artistic movements concerned foremost with emotion, such as romanticism, expressionism, Dadaism, surrealism, primitivism, spiritualism.

‘Affect is at the heart of art because art is routinely defined as a mode of being expressive of experience, feeling, sensation, and emotion that finds meaning and content in an artistic form.’

Literary theorist Ernst van Alphen coined the term ‘affective operations of art and literature’ to describe the social mode of art’s communication that powerfully transacts in affective intensities, trafficking in sensation that simulates thought. In short, I could summarise that art is affect plus form, or put differently, affect taking form. At this juncture of art and embodiment lies the question of affect, and the exercise of what the body (human and otherwise) can do, the extent of its power, its capacities to affect and to be affected. The tool of affect, therefore, is always present to the artist, but how, then, to become aware of its workings in generating social relations, in the configuration of power relations and the rupture of these relations?

esy.18.howtodothingswithaffects.webp — BOOK:
Ernst van Alphen and Tomáš Jirsa (editors), How to Do Things with Affects, Affective Triggers in Aesthetic Forms and Cultural Practices, Brill (2019).

Learning to Think Critically about Affect

There is no life without sensation. Affect studies provides a set of vocabulary that scholars, artists, and artistic researchers can employ to grope towards and grasp what is hard to pin down: sensation, feeling, a doing and undoing to the body, a happening that is underway. This essay will describe the analytical frameworks that affect studies has propagated that will be especially helpful for the scholar/artist invested in social justice issues to learn about as they critically think and create. Given that affect theory and the study of emotion are vast fields, full of competing and conflicting ideas, I have narrowed down my discussion to the contributions of feminist and queer (of colour) scholarship. This body of thought addresses affect in light of racial injustice, class and gender inequalities, climate justice, the rights of migrants and refugees, the discrimination of LGBTQ+ people, ageism and ableism. These pressing challenges of the twenty-first century are at the foreground of contemporary literature and art that seeks to effectuate a cultural intervention, and therefore should be issues emphasised within the curriculums of art academies and humanities programmes. Guiding my essay is the question: How is affect related to the social?

Allow me to begin with a sketch of affect’s prehistory to better situate the demarcations of feminist theory. In Western Eurocentric philosophies, the Aristotelian split established in the fourth century B.C. between logos (appealing to reason), ethos (appealing to authority) and pathos (appealing to emotion) has defined the three main rhetorical tools that persuade ‘social actors,’ that is, any member of a society addressed in speech or discourse. Pathos being the power of being moved to feel emotion—sadness, anger or suffering especially—is couched in terms of being manipulated in this tradition. In the Enlightenment’s idea of humans as autonomous and self-determined, logos and ethos were further elevated above pathos through the division of human rationality from irrationality, mind over body, with philosopher René Descartes (1637) being a prime author.

‘Guiding my essay is the question: How is affect related to the social?’

In this same period and geopolitical location, the drawings, etchings and paintings that Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669) produced of himself were keen, controlled studies of emotional expressions, and sold well as ‘tronies’ that popularly depicted an exaggerated facial expression related to a type, physiognomy, or the embodiment of an abstract value like folly or wisdom. As scientific disciplines began to consolidate and empiricism valorised visual evidence in the nineteenth century, we can find analyses like Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals (1872) that sought to taxonomise facial expressions into particular universal emotions, using an aesthetic mode of measuring affect.

In all cases of these prehistories, affect is tracked for its power: to persuade society, to disturb rational thought, to convey a type of selfhood. In the twentieth century, the major routes of studying how the feeling body knows and how to read the signs of affect consolidated into the theories of phenomenology and psychoanalysis (later psychology) respectively. Both of these branches have been inspirational for artists of all stripes but have also become reliable theoretical frameworks for the analysis of works of art.

Affect is a feminist problem in the sense that these prehistories champion a model of a sovereign, universal personhood that is, in fact, neither. The feminist insight is that this foregoing model relies on the split of mind from body, thought from emotion; further, the split aspects of personhood acquire an association with positive and negative values (mind and thought being more valued than body and emotion). These split aspects then become associated to larger, master narratives that hierarchise binaries of man (mind) / woman (body), white (thought) / black (emotion), human (cognition) / animal (intuition). The feminist author bell hooks famously called these interlocking systems of oppression the imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist, heteropatriarchy.

‘The split aspects of personhood acquire an association with positive and negative values.’

Critical fields of study addressing all of these arms of injustice based on hierarchies have developed theories of emotion and affect that challenge the understanding of the autonomous, individual subject by centring intersubjectivity, relationality, and our porous vulnerability to one another as sentient beings, which is to be affected by and to affect each other. Critical affect studies therefore are concerned with how a human’s psychic life has a social context as well as an individual character. This scholarship centralises how affects and emotions must be studied in relation to how they are shaped by historical, social and political norms and conventions. For instance, scholars look at how the norms and conventions that give meaning to categories of difference experienced on an individual level, such as race, gender, age, or sexuality, are not only social constructs, but take shape in and through social encounters charged by affect that can positively affirm identity, but also stigmatise the Other, and racialise that identity.

‘Embodied experience means not to the individual as an isolated, static subject, but an interrelated, changing, multiplex body shot through with socio-political vectors.’

In an effort to theorise the social as a domain structured by the ‘microphysics of power,’ in which, according to philosopher Michel Foucault, power is not a property but evident in the relations between people, contemporary cultural and critical theory has taken an affective turn. Broadly, these thinkers place emphasis on the question of experience, that is, what embodied experience means not to the individual as an isolated, static subject, but an interrelated, changing, multiplex body shot through with socio-political vectors. A definition in this vein of affect as a social relation comes from Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg’s introduction to the Affect Theory Reader: ‘Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities.’ In other words, affect is both how bodies relate and how that relation is experienced as it passes through and changes the body.

The affective turn is dated to the increase since the mid-1990s in humanities and social scientist scholarship engaging with the notion that what is felt ‘is neither internally produced nor simply imposed on us from external ideological structures.’ Affect shows us that experience is all about the instability of an ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ of the body. However, theorisations of experience by women of colour pre-date this moment; rightfully, they are increasingly being acknowledged as playing a prominent role in instigating the turn to critical concepts of affect that take on board the politics of embodiment.

A key source is This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, first published in 1981, edited by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, that propelled the idea of Third World Feminism. Building on Marxist conceptions of materialism, Moraga writes in her preface that ‘[t]he material in this book lives in the flesh of these women’s lives,’ referring to the contributors who use forms from poetry to autobiography and academic writing to express their experiences of being a bridge or of bridging cultures. They collectively write towards a vision of freedom through embodied affects: ‘the exhaustion we feel in our bones at the end of the day, the fire we feel in our hearts when we are insulted, the knife we feel in our backs when we are betrayed, the nausea we feel in our bellies when we are afraid, even the hunger we feel between our hips when we long to be touched.’

esy.18.thisbridgecalledmybackfirstedition1981.webp — BOOK:
/ Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa(editors) This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color is a feminist anthology, Persephone Press (1981)

‘A ‘theory in the flesh’ that attends to how one’s experiential contradictions of (non)belonging creates particular ‘physical realities of our lives,’ in relation to ‘our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings.’

Interrupting the rigor of class analysis that externalises both political problems and their revolutions, this ground breaking collection advances a ‘theory in the flesh’ that attends to how one’s experiential contradictions of (non)belonging creates particular ‘physical realities of our lives,’ in relation to ‘our skin color, the land or concrete we grew up on, our sexual longings’ that develops a situated, multifaceted ‘flesh and blood’ theory for explaining, a politic for resisting, and a vision for transforming societal conditions. The afterlives of this edited collection continue to bear scholarly fruit in many iterations of intersectional theories that attend to the felt microphysics of power: how power creates and shapes social reality. One example is Juana María Rodríguez’s award-winning 2014 book Sexual Futures: Queer Gestures and Other Latina Longings that rethinks sexual desires and political demands in terms of racialized affect, defined as ‘how feelings function in the realm of the social.’

Learning to Work Differently with Affect

Critical affect studies are thus infused with critiques coming out of postcolonial, queer, ethnicity and race, disability, intersex and trans theories that challenge the notion of a universal or baseline way of feeling, instead showing how affect can become weaponised or made into a technology of oppression, and likewise be a powerful source of knowledge and activist fuel. As the quote from Moraga above indicates, too often feeling bad or excessive is what it means to feel brown, black, yellow and red. One might look at how feeling bad and excessive is depicted in the performance-based sculpture of Rebecca Belmore, the paintings of Jean-Michel Basquiat, or the photographs of Laura Aguilar. How, then, to shift and disrupt the power relations of feeling different gradations of suffering? Audre Lorde’s essay ‘The Uses of Anger’ directly addresses the question of how anger and rage can be a precision tool, like a ‘spotlight,’ to dismantle systemic oppressions that underline experiences of women of colour. In her vision of reclaiming this supposed negative emotion—anger is often dismissed as useless and destructive—Lorde shares that anger/rage can be ‘focused’ to bring ‘precision’ and a ‘source of energy’ that directs and propels activist work. This could be in thought, speech, action, and I would venture also in creative interventions. Let us not forget that Lorde was a poet as well as a public intellectual; her poetry channelled her rage (see ‘A Poem for Women in Rage’ [1990] as an explicit example).

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Rebecca Belmore

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Jean-Michel Basquiat

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Laura Aguilar

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Audre Lorde, ‘The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,’ Keynote presentation, Connecticut, 1981.

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New Yorker: Read this Q&A with Myisha Cherry by Helen Rosner about Audre Lorde and rage as a tool in the fight against racial injustice.

esy.18.gettyimages1394054590.webp — Audre Lorde. Photo: Jackson State University Collection: Historically Black Colleges & Universities (HBCUs). Getty Images

‘The Uses of Anger’ directly addresses the question of how anger and rage can be a precision tool, like a ‘spotlight,’ to dismantle systemic oppressions that underline experiences of women of colour.’

esy.18.019smzanelemuholi2017phgjvanrooijcopy.webp — Exhibition view Zanele Muholi at Stedelijk Museum à Amsterdam, Series Faces and Phases, 2006-2017.
Foto Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam / Gert Jan van Rooij. With permission signed by STEVENSON on behalf of Zanele Muholi.

With razor sharp precision, acclaimed South African visual activist Zanele Muholi has tethered their photographic prowess to social change in the series Faces and Phases (2006-2014). Their artistic strategy is emotionally driven in the sense of appealing to pathos while bringing the issue of ‘corrective rape’ (pernicious acts of raping lesbians and trans men to ‘make’ them straight) and other hate crimes against queer people in South Africa to the awareness of viewers. Anger against racism, homophobia, lesbophobia and transphobia fuelled the project, along with personal loss and pain. These affects generated intensities that the tools of photography gave Muholi a constructive means to face, direct, and marshal those feelings.

The visual project enabled documentation, which at the same time was the creation of an archive where there was none. Additionally, anger at the dominant representation of the Black women as suffering guides Muholi’s aesthetic choices such as the tone and framing of the portraits, as well as their installation in a tightly arranged grid. These choices aim to reconfigure the predominant context of power relations hold together by ‘sticky’ affects like happiness and suffering, which feminist writer Sara Ahmed has described as when affects are ‘what sticks, or what sustains or preserves the connection between ideas, values, and objects.’ Such sticky affects often pass for common sense—‘of course a heterosexual marriage is a happy affair’—but such sticky orientations to happiness serve to cover over the social evaluation of heterosexuality as the norm or convention, and to affectively alienate those who do not experience it as their happiness.

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More work by Zanele Muholi at Stevenson

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Zanele Muholi at Stedelijk Museum à Amsterdam, Series Faces and Phases, 2006-2017.

‘Anger at the dominant representation of the Black women as suffering guides Muholi’s aesthetic choices such as the tone and framing of the portraits, as well as their installation in a tightly arranged grid.’

Interview with Zanele Muholi published by Tate modern: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oEgf1XmtWCo

Born at the height of apartheid, Muholi tells Deborah Willis in an interview that ‘The early images I remember are black-and-white images of apartheid-era South Africa. Most were captured by male photographers like Ernest Cole or Alf Kumalo. Early images I saw depicted black women crying, images of pain, of struggle.’ The series began in response to the disconnect between the landmark 2006 passage of same sex marriage rights in South Africa, a country with a highly progressive constitution, and the reality of violence faced by Black lesbians, trans men, and gender non-conforming people, including those perishing from HIV complications. Numbering around 300 images, Faces and Phases consists of black-and-white portraits framing a usually unsmiling subject, dressed in their best, often in a three-quarter turn, in front of a patterned background.

Muholi has described the political tone of the artistic portraits as ‘Not for show. Not for play.’ To only be art and aestheticised risks the portrayed being objectified, or the act of portraiture reduced to empty fun. Where these earlier images show acts of mourning and suffering women, a common trope in photo journalism and human rights documentation, Muholi’s portraits of composed, self-contained subjects exude a quiet power. Historically, portraiture as a genre was reserved for the social elite, which brings along conventions of dignifying and even sanctifying the sitter. Through sheer force of numbers, this counter-archive of queer women and trans people marshals vibrational awe and decolonial joy in simply being, and from this composed ‘being’ the persons in the photographs radiate power.

Looking through the artist’s monograph Faces and Phases, the portraits are interspersed with writings from the sitters. This format allows for the reader to potentially generate intimacy with each person, to think about their lives beyond and in the frame; to contemplate the idiosyncratic clothing choices and posture, the expression of defiance, an unguarded pose, a knowingness creeping into lips that almost start to smile. However, in the installations of Faces and Phases, which I have experienced in Amsterdam twice, Berlin, Brooklyn, and Johannesburg, the group staging of the images makes a forceful impact, overwhelming in their larger than life prints and the affixture of numerous eyes directed at the viewer.

Art historian Joseph Underwood writes about the subtle but impactful differences in the various grid installations of the series as it interacts with the space (narrow or sweeping), how spacing between portraits and having ‘missing’ portraits affects the viewer’s response to the grouping of a community under siege, and of connotations that come from the prints being pinned or under glass. I agree that these key curatorial choices can generate affects of loneliness or of belonging, of worry or pleasure, of physically being imposed upon or of being invited in. In the raucous South African openings hosted by the Stevenson Gallery, Muholi is famous for bussing in students and community members from townships who would ordinarily not have access to the urban art scenes of Cape Town, Johannesburg or Durban.

I witnessed such a lively event complete with the happy shrieks of greetings, dancing, group photos and selfie taking, a wall to add one’s own quote, a generous free sit-down meal, and the option to return for walk-throughs by the participants. The effect of the event of displaying the portraits as a whole was joyous and celebratory of a people, not only of a person. As a white non-South African, a double-outsider, I sensed the ripples of disrupted white affect that typically permeates such elite spaces as art galleries, in which whiteness is, according to performance studies scholar José E. Muñoz a ‘cultural logic that prescribes and regulates national feelings and comportment.’ These ripples, waves of affect I felt, were maybe something like the affective response coined by scholar and artist Frances Negrón-Muntaner as ‘decolonial joy’—that ‘necessarily collective’ joy in knowing you are stepping away from the logics and values (the pain and suffering) set by the coloniser.

In closing, affect as a tool could be seen as a spotlight, as in Lorde’s terms, a socially embedded feeling that works like a precision tool to define and direct the work of dismantling systemic oppressions. You might ask yourself how affect carries with it a social judgement or evaluation. What is the ‘bad feeling’ and who is asked to carry it, or hold discomfort? How does affect form a relation between people-objects-technologies-social worlds? What kind of intensification occurs through a particular art work? In your body in relation to it? How would you describe that ‘something’ that seems to saturate the environment? The goal of using affect as a tool, I will offer, is to pay attention to how affect is being directed and configured within a social relation, and as an artist to practise in a critical and aware manner how affect is generated in the relations and in the bodies of those engaging with your art.

‘These key curatorial choices can generate affects of loneliness or of belonging, of worry or pleasure, of physically being imposed upon or of being invited in.’

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Online Course

Want to delve further into the topic of this essay? Then take a look at the corresponding lesson that is part of an online course that consists of 10 lessons based on the 10 essays in this publication. These lessons focus on the central concepts that are treated in the essays and are followed by various questions, assignments and/or work formats.

The entire online course, including an extensive introduction, can be found via the button below. If you want to go directly to the assignments for this essay, click here.

, including an extensive introduction, can be found via the button below. If you want to go directly to the assignments for this essay, click here.