Against Proper Affective Objects

Outside of the fields of psychology and moral philosophy, the popularity of the term affect in the humanities and social sciences can most likely be attributed to the collection of Silvan Tomkins’s work edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters (1995).¹ While Tomkins’s theorization of affect is at its base a broad biological theory of how to understand and systematically categorize emotional response, controversially identifying only nine affects, cultural studies work on affect is implicitly indebted to a particular portion of his argument: script theory. It is script theory that provides a framework for discussing the relationship of biological response and ideology, of emotion to social construction. Biological discussions common in psychoanalytic and other psychological theories of affect are almost nonexistent in cultural studies work, as the intellectual genealogy of cultural studies projects is often Marxist and/or evolving from feminist and antiracist work. Such work is understandably skeptical of biological claims and most invested in the relationship between affect and ideology. Cultural studies projects about affect are thus always about emotion or feeling plus: plus liberalism, plus biopower, plus nationalism, plus any articulation of ideology in action. As affect in cultural studies work is a complex of emotion plus structure, affect can be a bit of a moving target, making the relationship between texts about affect hard to discern given the vastly different objects of study and methodologies. But whatever affect consistently is in recent studies, it is about the relationship between emotion and state power.

Duke University Press has published some of the most important work about emotion and politics in cultural studies, but the three books under review here seem at first to have little in common beyond the affect/structure complex. Disciplinary differences abound, but as texts that explore the ways in which culture works through Marxist and identity frameworks, all could fit loosely under a cultural studies rubric. Elizabeth Povinelli’s The Empire of Love: Toward a Theory of Intimacy, Genealogy, and Carnality explores the role of genealogical inheritances in relationship to what she terms “the intimate event” through topics as wide ranging as indigenous communities in Australia, radical faeries, and interracial marriage. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, edited by Patricia Ticineto Clough, collects wildly dissimilar essays about biopolitics, affect, and technology. Lauren Berlant’s The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture, examines various adaptations of “women’s texts” in order to recount the development of a “mass cultural intimate public in the United States” (vii). Nevertheless, these three texts have one other idea in common: a concern with the liberal subject’s place within modernity and postmodernity. Differences in subject matter and methodology aside, all three consistently take up the issue of the working of affect in contemporary culture. This focus is less obvious in Berlant, as her study predominantly focuses on “women’s texts,” produced in the first half of the twentieth century, but when she refers in her title to sentimentality’s “unfinished business,” she is talking about both women’s narration of pain and sentimentality as a still unfinished cultural formation in the present. Emotion has been an object of study in cultural studies since its inception, and scholars have been particularly concerned with how technological and cultural changes in the twentieth century have transformed affective experiences. For theorists of affect, the issue confronting contemporary culture is not what Frederic Jameson has called a waning of affect resulting from what he identifies as a postmodern depthlessness.² However, these texts are also in conversation with Jameson’s identification of postmodernity as reshaping affect. Texts about affect in contemporary culture explore how new generic...