Affect Theory

How does art shape our emotional landscapes? Continuing after Thing Theory, Affect Theory in art explores the impact of artworks on our bodies and sensations. It is questioning how art evokes pre-conscious, visceral responses and challenging traditional notions of art as solely a matter of meaning or representation. Looking at idea’s from Kathleen Stewart, Eric Shouse, and Gabriel Winant we will cover the basics of Affect in art.

Monet

Tactile Compositions by Kathleen Stewart introduces a conversation on Affect Theory, exploring how humans, animals, and their environments can reshape a place or experience. Kathleen Stewart illustrates how emotions and affect emerge from everyday moments, gradually forming emotional landscapes and how human intervention can render things inert. Read more about Stewarts ideas here:

https://culanth.org/fieldsights/words-in-worlds-an-interview-with-kathleen-stewart

Picasso

Eric Shouse moves deeper into Affect Theory in “Feeling, Emotion, Affect” by differentiating the terms. Feelings are personal, emotions are social, and affects prepersonal – “An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential” (1). Shouse compares affect to pain mechanism as it brings awareness and activates our urgency for action. Affect plays an important role in determining the relationship between our bodies, our environment, and others, and the subjective experience that we feel/think as affect dissolves into experience. Affect is unformed and unstructured allowing it to pass between bodies.

Rothko

Schouse uses music as an example, “... The pleasure that individuals derive from music has less to do with the communication of meaning and far more to do with the way the particular piece of music “moves” them” (2). He clarifies that affect is not someone adopting another person's feelings by how bodies can influence each other which makes it a powerful social force. In “An Inventory of Shimmers,” Seigworth and Gregg expand on Affect Theory as “...a body is as much outside itself as in itself – webbed in its relations – until ultimately such firm distinctions cease to matter” (3). 

Read the full essay here: https://journal.media-culture.org.au/mcjournal/article/view/2443

“We Found Love in a Hopeless Place” puts Affect Theory into a collective movement that evokes change against the power of pain and sheds a light of activism to the theory. Gabriel Winant described it as “the inward dimension of collective experiences as it is manifested back to the world and made visible through behavior” (4). The last page is enlightening and hopeful, “There may be no authentic self buried deep down, waiting to be discovered, but it might be possible to invent new selves in the crucible of shared struggle… the kind of social organization that keeps you coming back to the same slammed-shut door, again and again, because you love your comrades more than you’re afraid. There’s no way to win any justice without generating tremendous amounts of discomfort, for ourselves first of all” (18).