contagion

Contagion is affect transmission on a broader scale and is closely connected with studies of group and crowd psychology, wherein a group of persons transmit affect between each other. An individual within a group is likely to pick up on and vibrate to an affect that permeates the atmosphere. This reproduction of affect will then reinforce the original atmospheric condition, making it even stronger and more stimulating to the senses. Others, then, are more likely to pick up on the same affective state, creating a social sort of affective loop. The more affectively charged the atmosphere of the group, the more suggestible individual members become to certain ideas. Since particular affective states are more conducive to particular ideas, a group resonating to an intense affect is more likely to take on similar ideas. For example, if an aggressive affective state exists, persons within that atmosphere are apt to feel aggressive tendencies. This phenomenon explains the “group mind” that can emerge when a gathering of people leads particular members to lose their individual sovereignty and to think or feel as one. Teresa Brennan cites experiments that ground the contagious nature of affect in psycho-neuroendocrinology (Brennan 88). Depending on their content, images can trigger an increase or decrease in hormones (Brennan 71). Such hormonal changes are measurably intensified when people are in groups (Brennan 71).

Contagion is of particular interest to affect theory because of its political implications. Political operatives or propagandists have been known to take advantage of affective contagion to pernicious ends, producing images or rhythms that put people in certain affective states that then reproduce. Such a tactic might be used to activate states of aggression or fear in groups. This view of crowds suggests that groups are less autonomous or capable of reason than its individual members on their own. The danger of affect, then, is that its contagious qualities might enable “groupthink,” making persons susceptible to the kind of manipulation that they might individually be able to resist.

This loss of individuality is not necessarily always harmful, however. Gustave Le Bon, a French psychologist who studied group mentality in his influential 1895 book The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, pointed out that an “individual would put his own interests first. A crowd need not” (qtd. in Brennan 54). Although Le Bon was anxious about crowd behavior, he does underscore how crowds can be self-sacrificing, an aspect that might be harnessed for good. The same benefit holds true in political systems where groups prioritize the system’s functionality over members’ own individual interests.

The theory of affective contagion can also be extended to explain the historicity of affective experiences, a phenomenon that Raymond Williams has called “structures of feeling.” For instance, today we have labels for particular affective states: chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS) and ADHD name the lack or excess of energy respectively. One’s level and type of energy is influenced by one’s surroundings. A person surrounded by abundantly depressive or nervously active affects may reflect those behaviors society at that time pathologizes as CFS or ADHD. Belief in this medical view of normal and abnormal energy levels may lead to identification with the diagnoses of CFS or ADHD. This affiliation is known as “hysterical identification,” when people  see themselves as suffering from CFS or ADHD even if they do not necessarily “have” these disorders (Brennan 3). Such a view is not quite accurate for it obscures identification’s roots in the flesh (Brennan 3). The derogatory term also ignores the process of contagion. Just as an affect in the air can be taken up and reinforced by a group of people, so have CFS and ADHD been culturally. In both cases, the internalized affect is real. The labels of CFS and ADHD reflect the historical affects of a contemporary moment because they normalize a certain “balance” of energy and pathologize deviation from a particular affective norm. But the phenomena of identification, reinforcement,  and contagion of these disorders mean that these disorders feel quite real. In a similar way, other historical periods may be characterized by certain affective moods that express those moments’ social norms.

 Tara Rayers

Works Cited:

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Williams, Raymond. “Structures of Feeling.” Marxism and Literature. Oxford University
Press, 1978. 128-135.

 

transmission

The idea of affect’s transmission has roots that extend centuries back, Teresa Brennan argues. As an object of study, however, the transmission of affect perhaps began with the epistemological questions of the eighteenth century. Where do emotions originate? How do we know if the emotions we feel truly belong to us? These questions were of major importance to thinkers dedicated to Descartes’s view of the individual as the sum of his or her cognitive reasoning (the famous “I think, therefore I am”). Rationalist accounts idealized the subject as self-contained and self-governing, and therefore able to properly regulate his or her own emotions. But philosophers also acknowledged that affects were highly mobile, a fact that threatened the view of the individual as an identity who owned its own sentiments.

Empiricist philosopher David Hume, for instance, describes passions transmitted between bodies, actually producing identity rather than the other way around. Hume posits two ways of perceiving: through impressions and through ideas, both of which can be transmitted from one person (or object) to another person. Such “impressions,” as Adela Pinch notes, have “no representational content” (33). In his 1739 Treatise of Human Nature, Hume describes such sense perception as a “firmness, or solidity, or force, or vivacity” that physically impresses upon a body (51-52). This impression is different from an idea: one can see, feel, or otherwise experience a chair (an “impression”) as well as understand the idea of what a chair is. For Hume, impressions and ideas are both transmitted between people through the process of sympathy. In this process, a person who sees someone crying would understand that the crying is a sign of the idea of sadness, itself based upon the physical impression of this experience. This impression could then turn into an idea within the one who received the impression. The process all happens when one understands or feels for another – when one sympathizes.

Contemporary affect theory draws on this notion of “sympathetic transmission” through impressions and ideas. Affect transmission resembles the notion of sympathy as “fellow-feeling,” a term repeatedly used by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Unlike Smith, however, affect theory considers fellow-feeling mainly a bodily experience. Like Hume, affect theorists tend to split physical “impressions” from cognitive “ideas.” Thus, impressions look like “intensities” while “ideas” resemble “content or context.” As with Hume’s theory, the body in affect theory comprehends social situations. When an individual interacts with others (or with a work of art), his or her body is impressed with an intensity not necessarily dependent upon the content of that situation or text. At the same time, another place in the flesh or in the mind takes in a trace of the content or context of the social interaction or work of art, storing the content/context for later experiential understanding. The impression might be termed a person’s “affective state,” a state without any necessary cognitive content.

While Hume and older thinkers did not focus on the mechanism of affect’s transfer, recent work has tried to explain the process. One explanation for affective transfer is known as “entrainment,” whereby one person transmits an affective state to another either chemically or electrically (Brennan 22). For instance, people secrete pheromones through their glands based on their affective state (such as fear or anger). Released into the surrounding atmosphere in the form of a smell, such pheromones can be picked up by another person’s chemoreceptors, triggering the internal secretion of a hormone and thus changing that person’s neurological or biochemical state. Electrical transmission has not been as thoroughly explored, but Brennan describes this process as one involving the effects of one person’s nervous system on another. Rhythm or pattern of a voice can thus alter another person’s affective state. This type of entrainment has greater implications for transmission between groups or for the process of affective contagion.

Since affect is often conceived as not individualized and without content, its impression has limitless potential. A person thinks or acts only after meaning becomes attached to a potential. As Brennan describes it, “the point is that, even if I am picking up on your affect, the linguistic and visual content, meaning the thoughts I attach to that affect, remain my own: they remain the product of the particular historical conjunction of words and experiences I represent” (7). In this way, one’s thoughts can actually result from one’s affective state, rather than one’s thoughts producing one’s affective state. One does not necessarily feel joy because one is thinking of a joyful experience. This autonomy of affect raises epistemological questions: to what extent do thoughts and actions originate in the self and thus, to what extent is the self determined or has free will? One answer is to stop viewing action either as a binary of agency or passivity. As Silvan Tomkins points out, our doings need not be understood as “essentially two-valued, either determinate or capriciously free” (35).

Tara Rayers

Works Cited:

Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.

Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Ed. L.A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1896.

Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83-109.

Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Penguin Group, 2009.

Tomkins, Silvan. “What are affects?” Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve
Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

mood

Boundaries are often considered permeable in affect theory, and such is the case with the border between mood as an internal state and as an external ambience. These two sides of mood not only coexist but mutually interact through the affective processes of transmission and contagion.

According to some affect theorists, one site where the mood of the exterior world interacts with that of the interior is the face. In his discussion of Wordsworth’s poem “Michael,” Pfau speaks of a face that appears within the ballad as a place where mood shifts. This “proud face” belongs to Michael’s son Luke who has lost the inheritance of his father’s land. Luke’s visage in its pride both reveals his internal mood and conceals it. He has been shut out of the pastoral landscape through his family’s losses, and he, in turn, shuts out the reader and his father through the bold expression he wears. Pfau writes: “All that Michael ever knows of Luke is his ‘face,’” which, while powerful and memorable, is not present at the poem’s end. Luke must leave the pastoral land where he had expected to spend his life. Anna Gibbs touches upon the power of the face to convey mood in her essay “After Affect.” She claims that faces appear in highly communicative nonhuman forms within media images. These forms include “landscapes, houses, food, animals, skin and choreographed bodies,” whose faces “conjure more complex representations of mood” (Gregg and Seigworth 191).

The boundary between external and internal is markedly permeable in Brian Massumi’s discussion of mood and its function within a neoliberal political environment. Massumi speaks of how the events of September 11, 2001, brought an affective shift that disrupted our conceptions of the future. Usually, projections about the future are based on the events of the past. “But the mood has changed,” he writes. “It may be hoped that the future can be induced as a linear extension from the past, it is feared that it may not” (Gregg and Seigworth 4). For Massumi, the change in mood after 9/11 ushered in a state of pervasive fear.

Caroline Wilkinson

Works Cited:

Gregg, Melissa and Gregory Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke UP, 2010.

Pfau, Thomas. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2005.

anticipation/suspense

Anticipation and suspense are both ways we look forward toward the future. While similar, anticipation is often more psychological, while suspense typically refers to narrative structure. As a psychological mechanism, anticipation shapes an individual’s behavior. The anticipation of a reaction alters the normal stimulus-response mechanism and its relation to affect. While a hand might recoil from a hot stove the first time because of burning pain, subsequent avoidance results instead from the fear caused by anticipating the sensation. Moreover, this fear may, in turn, evoke further feelings of distress or relief. This mechanism serves, of course, an essential function in the educational process. By learning to anticipate pain, the individual also learns to prevent it.

Anticipation also fuels the social nature of affects. Just as we learn to expect the burn, socialization teaches us to expect certain responses to behaviors. As Adam Smith shows, even when an act goes unnoticed, a man who acts in accordance with society’s perceived values feels satisfaction from the approval. He will “anticipat[e] the applause and admiration which in this case would be bestowed upon him, and he applauds and admires himself by sympathy with sentiments, which do not indeed actually take place, but which the ignorance of the public alone hinders from taking place” (139). This claim echoes contemporary affect studies, particularly with regard to the degree of freedom an individual has in society. Children learn propriety through “playing at” emotions and the anticipation of particular responses teaches them as much as a hot stove (Stein 153). By encouraging the individual to act or feel in accordance with anticipated societal approbation or disapprobation, anticipation fundamentally influences other affects.

Anticipation can also be an affect in its own right, as in the general “state of anticipation.” As with other affects, in the case of both physiological reflexes and socialized behavior, anticipation has autonomous status, as its mechanics lie outside of individual control. Reflexes, behavior, and emotions depend more on the training of anticipation than on rational thought. Moreover, anticipation can also detach from particular objects, gaining more of an atmosphere, a phenomenon perhaps most apparent in crowd and mob scenes. People commonly describe the “buzz” that takes shape when there’s the possibility of an exciting event or important announcement. This buzz, building primarily off anticipation, may be divorced from any single cause. Through affective contagion, the excitement of others spreads, even if there is no evidence of a genuine reason for that affect. Instead of expectation, as in the socialization and behavioral examples above, anticipation here builds off of an open-ended possibility.

While we rarely characterize everyday life in terms of “suspense,” the term serves as anticipation’s aesthetic equivalent. In a narratological sense, plot and its pleasures depend upon alternating between suspense and satisfaction. A story establishes uncertainty, which it will then resolve or not, in deliberate subversion of suspense. In this sense, suspense seems to contrast with anticipation, as suspense relies on uncertainty, while anticipation comes from expectation. Narrative suspense largely derives from the reader’s capacity to imagine possible outcomes, harnessing the tension that results from multiple anticipations operating at the same time.

The “structural affect theory” of W. F. Brewer and E. H. Lichtenstein considers suspense in relation to curiosity and surprise. All three phenomena involve knowledge of an event, but differ based on the order in which the text reveals outcome, causation, and related events (Hoeken and van Vliet 277-279). Several studies have shown that suspense does not depend entirely on the lack of knowledge. Even when a story’s ending is known, its narrative ordering and pace still allow suspense to develop (Hoeken and van Vliet 285). Moreover, suspense also emerges out of the reader’s identification with a character, an aspect of sympathy where the character’s concerns become the reader’s (Knobloch et. al. 261). Additionally, the experiences a reader brings to texts have some influence, as a story presented as “fiction” will often generate different expectations or allowances of suspense than one presented as “news” (Knobloch et. al. 281). The reader’s familiarity with generic conventions thus create a set of expectations that affect how the reader responds to the text’s narrative structure, including its use of suspense.

Andrew Todd

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. What Is Philosophy? Trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. New York: Columbia UP, 1994.

Hoeken, Hans and Mario van Vliet. “Suspense, Curiosity, and Surprise: How Discourse Structure Influences the Affective and Cognitive Processing of a Story.” Poetics 26 (2000): 277-286.

Knobloch, Silvia, et. al. “Affective News: Effects of Discourse Structure in Narratives on Suspense, Curiosity, and Enjoyment While Reading News and Novels.” Communication Research 31.3 (June 2004): 259-287.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Stein, Ruth. Psychoanalytic Theories of Affect. London: Karnak, 1991.

Tomkins, Silvan. “What Are the Affects?” Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Uidhir, Christy Mag. “An Eliminativist Theory of Suspense.” Philosophy and Literature 35.1 (April 2011): 121-133.

affect/emotions

Most accounts of affect are broad enough to apply across diverse disciplines. In an attempt to further explore the human condition (that is, the ways in which we understand ourselves as well as how we interact with each other, physical objects, and situations), affect studies endeavors to identify the process through which human beings feel. With that said, in The Affect Theory Reader, a book dedicated to the affective body, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg emphasize the innumerable options of understanding the theory at hand:

“There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be. If anything, it is more tempting to imagine that there can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect: theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds” (3-4).

As Seigworth and Gregg suggest, affect theory, as an academic approach, continually blurs into several different fields and is still forming as a theoretical lens. Although the conceptualization of affect changes according to the field, the majority of scholars across disciplines agree upon the following details concerning affect theory: 1) Baruch Spinoza coined and framed the term affect; 2) affect is, at its base, a force that operates mainly at the non-conscious level; and 3) the two main views on affect categorize it as either “innate” or “relational,” sometimes both at the same time.

The evolution of affect theory begins in the seventeenth century when Spinoza introduced the term, “affect,” in his most renowned work, Ethics. For Spinoza, affect is both bodily and mental in origin. The study of affect can also be seen as having a pre-history in the concepts of sensibility, sentimentality, and romantic feelings. These phenomena first appear in creative works (usually sentimental, Romantic, and Gothic novels and poetry) and in theories of gender difference. Philosophers such as Adam Smith did not necessarily refer to affect as a specific philosophical theory of understanding, but rather as grounds for the “moral sentiments” of individuals. Smith posited that the emotions of one person could be felt by another, a transmission of emotions called sympathy. Smith fashioned a socially-theoretical foundation for understanding affect. He not only wrote about affective moral education as articulated through sympathy but also how the perception of such sympathy by fellow citizens solidified the individual’s relations with other individuals in the surrounding community. Hence, a subject wronged by another can rouse others in the group to rise against the offender because of the affective atmosphere generated by the social situation. Affect theorists do not necessarily invoke these philosophers but their works might be seen as the origins for theorizing affect’s power to explain human action. More recently, philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have expanded on Spinoza. Deleuze translates Spinoza’s ideas into an approach to the arts. To Deleuze, affect is not only a humanized relational force but also manifests within and as a work of art. One can thus talk about the affect of a single painting or novel. Deleuze even links artistic quality to the work’s capacity to produce new and unique affects.

As indicated above, affect scholars might be categorized according to two major strands, the innate and the relational. The innate approach to affect reads affective forces as stemming from and observed within the individual. This take interprets human affects as derived from a physical body shaped by psychological, biological, and /or physiological forces. For such intrinsic theorists, affect is founded on electrical processes naturally happening in the brain (psychological and/or biological), where individual faculties are genetically or evolutionarily fostered, along with the supposed ability of empathy of an individual. Scholars in the intrinsic school tend to describes such forces as drives, a term serves as an umbrella for psychological processes within the body. Psychoanalytic scholars usually study the intrinsic side of affect while sociological disciplines follow the extrinsic.

The relational approach, by contrast, insists on affect as enacted through the relationships between persons. These forces are understood to be the unseen atmosphere between conceptual bodies that incites physical or mental action. Such bodily interactions bear different forms: human-to-human, human-to-environment, human-to-object, or object-to-object. Affect aims to describe and map out such relations. For example, a relationist study might be interested in explaining a situation why one is able to walk into a room and feel the tension between the people already present. Affective forces are therefore understood to have transmissible qualities, according to the relationists. Especially within fields such as sociology, scholars look at affect as a transference of feelings between human beings in order to explain social phenomena such as crowd dynamics, sympathy, and empathy. Such processes help explain riots or the celebratory atmosphere at a football game. Other scholars may analyze the affective links between different objects (non-human/non-animal), for instance, a perspective along the lines of Feng Shui. No one of these approaches (innate or relational) is reserved for a specific discipline.

Affect, as an intangible force, is often described in terms of its intensity. Levels of strength shape the individual’s subsequent reactions towards that affect or feeling. For instance, the difference between tearing up (slight sniffling, flushed cheeks, along with a few tears) and sobbing (fully running nose, inability to properly breath, along with the choked coughs) as reactions to and expressions of sadness reflect the level of intensity of that sadness. The intensity-to-effects ratio can be analyzed by scholars despite how that individual is experiencing the affective force: intrinsically or relationally.

The distinction between affect and emotion is a major matter of dispute in the field. Some scholars consider affect as the theory of feeling, that is, if we accept the word “feeling” as separate from emotions—in that feeling is the unnamed force either inside or outside the body. In other words, some believe affect to be the cause of emotions in individuals (Massumi and Tomkins). Massumi views emotions as a fixed named form while affect is an immeasurable intensity. This distinction between affect and emotion mean there may be multiple forms of affect that eventually turn into a corresponding emotion or that there may be simply one affect that can potentially flow into different categories of emotions. Affect is often depicted as disconnected from consciousness, a force autonomous to the willed command of body and thought. Scholars are therefore looking at a force that seems to escape the realm of cognitive capture. As a result, affect is almost unanimously separated from the conventional lexicon of “emotions.” The terms “feelings,” “sensation,” and “sentiments,” however, tend to be used by several scholars in tandem with affect, in that they are considered to be unnamed forces.

This unnamed quality of affect proves to be problematic. As Seigworth and Gregg (among many other scholars) point out, affect theory focuses on something that can never be fully pinned down and examined, a constantly moving force. In an attempt to resolve this dilemma, many scholars lean towards describing the effects of affect, as if affects were synonymous with named emotions and their well-known symptoms. And yet in spite of such attempts, as Massumi asserts, “there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary for affect” (88). Since scholars do not possess the linguistic tools for the theory, they must analyze its effects in hopes to acquire a more thorough look at the underlying causes. Thus, this website presents articles explaining, through the lens of affect, emotional complexes such as shame, anger, fear, joy, excitement, awe, distress, and trauma. The approach to affect has thus adapted to the problem of the unnamable. But can we in fact effectively use words to describe something that is theoretically outside of language?

Jewel Williams

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Percept, Affect and Concept.” What is Philosophy? Trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. 163-199.

Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83-109.

Seigworth, Gregory & Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 1-28.

Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Economic Classic, 2013.

Tomkins, Sylvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.