Abstract
Despite the broad expansion in affective geography’s applications over the past decade, its theoretical frameworks have changed relatively little since the energetic mid-2000s. Perhaps affect theory became a casualty of the academic article’s size and depth constraints, a format whose reviews of old literature sometimes linger at the costs of marginalizing new contributions and restricting theorists to broad, summative statements. Or perhaps its slow advance is the consequence of overzealous interpretations of ‘weak theory’ (Sedgwick, 1997; Sedgwick and Frank, 1995: 518–519) which are very effective at warding off transcendent totalizations but sometimes fail to introduce supple and nuanced counter-formulations. Whatever the causes—and despite its reputation for being obsessively, opaquely theoretical—there is much less theory than fieldwork happening in affect studies today.
This is what that makes Encountering Affect an important work. Offering what is arguably the discipline’s first attempt at an expansive and coherent theorization of affect, Anderson models a richly structured approach to undertaking research in this critical area without sacrificing theoretical rigor or innovation. Here, weak theory adds nuance to four programmatic statements that evolve into a broad theoretical–methodological project. Articulated twice in slightly altered forms, they appear initially as the Introduction’s ‘starting points’ (pp. 13–14) and later transform into the Conclusion’s ‘propositions’ (pp. 168–169). The transition from ‘points’ to ‘propositions’ follows the arc of the text’s theoretical trajectory and is a testament to Anderson’s strong grasp of weak theory: A grouping of informal, situated beginnings develops into a series of formal theoretical statements. The latter are worth reproducing at length: 1. If there is no such thing as ‘affect itself’, then affects are always being contextualized and articulated with…more or less anything. One key task for analysis is to understand the operation, efficacy and coexistence of the varied processes of mediation through which affective life is ordered. 2. If affective life is collective because it is always-already mediated, then we need to understand how affective life is part of specific patterns of relations and events…Apparatuses, encounters, structures and ensembles are all different ways in which affective life is organized. 3. If affects, feelings, atmospheres, and so on, are irreducible to other non-affective social or natural processes, then analysis might focus on the different and specific ways in which they act and make a difference…. 4. If affect is not the non-representational object per se, then language and communication become one form of ‘positive process in social reality’…amongst others, and representations of affective life may have performative affects…[A]n analytics of affect might ask how affective life is always-already informed by ‘versions’ of emotion, affect, feeling, passion, and so on (as well as considering representations as affective elements in encounters, apparatuses and conditions). A theory of affect that acknowledges the multiplicity of versions of affect that exist must also acknowledge its own contingency. (Anderson, 2014: 168–169)
He accomplishes this by way of an innovative theoretical structure that ends where Spinoza’s Ethics effectively begins: with a substantial set of propositions. But where the philosopher of affect grounds his propositions in a brief set of formal ‘definitions’ that seek to grasp concepts directly, the entirety of Anderson’s text develops three ‘translations’ that locate affects indirectly. In this dance of indirect translation and conditional proposition, affect becomes ‘an object-target of apparatuses;…a bodily capacity emergent from encounters; and…a collective condition that mediates how life is lived and thought’ (Anderson, 2014: 18). That is, affect always approaches definition but only by virtue of its emergent relation to something else.
Framing affects as object-targets of specific apparatuses of power bypasses varieties of intentionalist liberal philosophy that often grafts meaning and subjectivity directly onto affectivity. Borrowing Foucault’s notion of molecular life, Anderson insists that affects emerge vicariously through the invention and operation of governance apparatuses at the same time that affects are what those apparatuses must target. Affects, in other words, are side effects. Cutting an epistemological path through affect theory’s ontological brambles, Anderson eschews kinds or categories of affect in favor of, as Despret (2004) would put it, ‘versions’ expressed through the situated operations of differential power relations. If Foucault accomplishes something similar in his biopolitical work (see: Woodward, 2011: 333–337), Anderson illustrates that similar critical procedures must be repeated wherever apparatuses invent and inflect new affects. Thus, for example, his work on the role of morale in total war describes the invention of ‘debility, dependency, and dread’ as the affects corresponding to the West’s—more specifically, the United States’—emerging torture apparatus during the twentieth Century.
As bodily capacities emergent from encounters, Anderson’s affects come closest to resembling popular geographical theorizations of affect. It is therefore appropriate that he deploys this translation to challenge recent criticisms of nonrepresentational theory, particularly those currents that misread ‘a level of ineffable autonomic bodily reactions’ as being wholly ‘inaccessible to subjects’ and equate affect to ‘an always overflowing life’ (Anderson, 2014: 93). Implicitly differentiating the nonrepresentational from the anti-representational, Anderson counters that affect is ‘indistinguishable from emotions. This means tracing how affects are formed in the midst of encounters and are mediated in ways that are not reducible to “representational-referential systems”’ (p. 93). Combined, the first two translations reaffirm Anderson’s commitment—from his earliest work—to finding new strategies for articulating the intersections between affectivity and subjectivity.
Constituting the back third of the book, the project’s trickiest and arguably most important gambit translates affect as collective conditions. Perhaps with the exception of anxiety (Simondon, 1989), all affects would seem to be social and collective. While Simondon and others have prepared the ground for this discussion in affect theory (see Deleuze and Guattari, 1987; Simondon, 1989; Woodward, 2011), Anderson’s treatment merges two unlikely ideological tendencies whose intersections produce challenging questions for thinking affect collectively: first via the political conditions of Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’ and autonomist Marxist renderings of precarity (Chapter 5), and second through atmospheric conditions identified by French existentialist-phenomenologist Mikel Dufrenne and other post-Kantian thinkers (Chapter 6).
Anchoring their analyses to class struggle (but also other modalities of collective difference, such as raced and colonized identities), chapter 5’s radical thinkers offer a political framework that makes contingent, social collectivity itself a constituent condition for the rise of specific affects (e.g class solidarity or Fanon’s colonized mind). I have made similar connections elsewhere (Woodward, 2011; Woodward and Lea, 2010), and Anderson’s analysis further convinces me that collectivity is a robust way to think about affectivity and its conditions. However, I find it difficult to square the ideologies of social collectivity with the following chapter, where he turns to liberal phenomenology to address the question of atmospheres. Anderson is careful to acknowledge that collective affects are ‘not reducible to the bodies that they envelop’ (Anderson, 2014: 160), which is surely a step in the right direction of avoiding reductive subjectivisms. Yet the challenge as I see it concerns the post-Kantian tendencies implicit within the phenomenological project, which assert individual subjectivity as the ground for their theoretical gestures. Thus, where we venture into the question of collective affects by way of post-Kantian phenomenology, we do so under implicit structural assumptions about the primacy of a sovereign subject which render any collective modes of affect secondary.
Anderson is careful to wrestle with this challenge and seeks to avoid making the liberal subject a foregone conclusion. However, I wonder if this condition can be vanquished from phenomenology without dissolving its entire theoretical discourse. But the difference between liberal and collective subjectivity is not simply a question that confronts Encountering Affect, it is a recurrent ambiguity that appears throughout affect theory. That we reach such theoretical depths by way of Anderson’s translations is perhaps the best indicator of the greatness of this contribution. A new period of theorizing about affect must begin by grappling with the propositions that Anderson offers for resolving its apparent contradictions.