Beyond the Aesthetic and the Anti-Aesthetic

8. Theoretical Positions: Affect Theory at Large

Later in the week, the seminar returned to affect theory, considering it from a more general standpoint. The participants considered a wide range of possible sources for theorizing affect in the arts, from general cultural theories to theories specific to the arts. A general model, in which affect is at once a product of systems and language, and also something that underlies them, is woven throughout the conversation. James Elkins: Let me change direction a little, and introduce some thoughts that might be helpful in exploring affect theory. It seems to me affect has attracted widespread interest in the art world, and that it is the principal contender for a reconceptualization of the aesthetic and anti-aesthetic at a “deeper structural level.” The difficulty is that it hasn’t congealed into a coherent body of theories. Affect has been related to ongoing interests in multisensory artworks, immersive environments , the theorization of disabilities, the articulation of identity in queer theory, the adoption of notions of “animism,” the pertinence for some practices of fetishism and totemism. Let me propose three locations of affect theory, which I think can help triangulate it: First, there are explicit theorizations of affect in philosophy, psychoanalysis, and other fields. I would list them this way: (a) a putatively Freudian form, perhaps best found in The Interpretation of Dreams; (b) an anticonceptual form, which we have emblematized in our seminars with the phrase “a-signifying nonsign ”; (c) Brian Massumi’s Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002); (d) Rei Terada’s Feeling in Theory (2001); and (e) the related exposition in Deleuze’s book on Bacon, regarding “sensation.” These five are theorizations we have discussed. In addition I know of at least two more sources for affect theory: Second, there’s affect in art history and criticism. This second location of affect theory is in and for art history, and specifically the art history of the late 1960s and 1970s. In this kind of work, which Eve has done in relation to Robert Morris’s “withdrawal” from aesthetics, affect appears in scholarship as an enlargement or correction of previous interpretations: it acknowledges what was omitted and makes it continuous with meanings that were in place. Third, there is affect in artworks. There are many possible examples. I think over the course of the week we’ve mentioned Candice Breitz, Olafur Eliasson, Bill Viola, and James Turrell, but the phenomenon is much wider than fine art. Meredith Kooi had us watching the “Double Rainbow” video and its video response, and just this morning, in the New York Times, there was an article 8. theoretical positions AFFECT THEORY AT LARGE Beyond the Aesthetic And the Anti-Aesthetic 100 about kitten and puppy videos on the Internet. One of the most-watched videos of all time is a kitten being tickled, and there’s a video response, in which someone tickles their dog and gets no response. They are fabulous videos, pure affect, distilled to a dangerous degree, all the content boiled away. This third location of affect is the one I’ve associated with our students, and with some young artists: I think it’s significantly different from the first two, and quite possibly disjunct from our theme. The first and second locations of affect theory are definitely beholden to historical formulations of the anti-aesthetic, but the third is something different, and to the extent that it prevails, it sweeps everything before it. Diarmuid Costello: I think there are two ways of thinking about affect in play. One would see affect as the emergence of something that subtends symbolic regimes. There are numerous examples of this structural relation between affect and symbolic regime: the relation between primary and secondary process in Freud or semiotic and symbolic in Kristeva, between gesture and language in MerleauPonty or figure and discourse in Lyotard. There is the same broad structural relation between the two terms in each, something that can be traced all the way back to the relation between nature and taste (or culture) in Kant’s theory of genius. All those metaphors have in common a sense of an eruption, into the symbolic, of what subtends symbolic orders. They refer to a break or hiatus in signifying practices. The other concept of affect, which came out of Eve’s papers, sees affect emerging not from below symbolic structures, but as a product of symbolic structures. The expression “a-signifying non-sign” only arises to describe affect as the product of...