Affect Theory

Abstract

Abstract This review concerns the interconnections between the theory and practice of affect, where both are understood as a spiral dance that is intimate and entangled, troubled and tense. Specifically, it will review the year’s work in affect theory through the bind of practice and theory and consider how practices have attempted to record feelings, as well as whether such recording is at all possible. This idea is drawn from Gregory J. Seigworth and Carolyn Pedwell’s introduction to The Affect Theory Reader 2. The two get into the sticky, intractable, reverberating, grasping, rhythmic, and touchy-feely capacities of affects that render them, as Jasbir K. Puar puts it, ‘a site of bodily creative discombobulation and resistance’ (‘Prognosis Time’ [2009], p. 161). But Seigworth and Pedwell hold: ‘Of course this is easy to assert in theory but much harder to pull off in practice’ (p. 10). Much of The Affect Theory Reader 2 calls attention to how theory and practice co-constitute each other rather than oppose one another. This co-constitution can be messy and troubling, but, as Seigworth and Pedwell contend, such ‘ambiguities, overdeterminations, clots, tensions, and stuckness’ are the ‘initiating condition’ (p. 15) of affect theory. To lean into uncertainty, muddle through entanglements, trace the intractable, attend to the sensory, and attune to the excesses of bodies are all practices of affect theory. To quote Seigworth and Pedwell once more: ‘When something sticks, practice begins to turn to saturation—or maybe almost nothing sticks, then it is all on the fade—or sometimes, you are left half-suspended and middling through’ (p. 16). This review, then, considers works with specific apparatuses that reveal, relay, transmit, or determine the conditions of affect. These are the apparatuses that make the stickiness of affect apparent. The review is divided into three sections, each naming a distinct apparatus: 1. Autotheory; 2. Archives; 3. Laboratories. All the works in this review concern these three apparatuses or are scaffolded by them in their contact with affect. The concluding Section 4, Final Thoughts, considers how these works, whether congruous in their position on the recording of feelings or not, showcase the entanglement of theory and practice and demonstrate that affects in practice are as shimmering as affects in theory.