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Mark B. N. Hansen: Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity as Environmental Force
Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity as Environmental Force
(p. 65 – 86)
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Affectivity as Environmental Force

Mark B. N. Hansen

Feelings without Feelers, or Affectivity as Environmental Force

PDF, 22 pages

What does it mean to define affect as excessive in relation to emotion, or in relation to drive? This is the crucial question that was posed by Brian Massumi and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick in two watershed articles from 1995 that are largely responsible for putting affect on the map for the theoretical humanities. This question, the focus of Massumi’s The Autonomy of Affect and Sedgwick’s Shame in the Cybernetic Fold (written with Adam Frank), holds the key to understanding why their rejuvenations of older lineages in affect theory – of Spinoza and of Silvan Tomkins, respectively – have proven so influential. Despite polarizing affect in fundamentally different, and in some sense, precisely opposite ways, Sedgwick and Massumi converge in their development of affective sociality as excessive in relation to the host of delimited subjective unities, including “deconstructed” ones that have been central to scholarship in the theoretical humanities over the past half-century. For Massumi, affect is more diffuse and in some sense less “human” than emotion, and as such, furnishes a “line of flight” from the all-too-human and all-too-cognitive human being that has anchored models of subjectivity from Descartes to Derrida. For Sedgwick, affect is less automatic and in some sense more “human” than drive, and as such, furnishes a paratactic logic of behavioral motivation which breaks free from overriding narrative and philosophical conceptions of a core self in order to focus on concrete acts of affective engagement. By shifting focus from emotion and drive to affect itself, these two critics have quite literally inaugurated a whole new terrain for exploring subjective behavior beyond the human subject.

When we ask, however, what sustains or hosts the excess of affectivity, neither Massumi nor Sedgwick can give a convincing response. Both critics invoke, or rather postulate, the operation of a sociality – “pure sociality” (Massumi) or “social affect” (Sedgwick) – that somehow forms a “virtual remainder” or “non-egoic actant” paradoxically generated within and as part of a process of bodily or narrative capture. What remains beyond the reach of both projects (and, by implication, of the wealth of scholarly production they have catalyzed) is any capacity to speak of affectivity as truly “autonomous”, where autonomy would betoken an authentic independence and a positive existence beyond the effect-structure that furnishes a crucial hermeneutic thread for both critics. The result is a situation in which affect can be theorized as being “two-sided” or as functioning outside of...

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  • media theory
  • Alfred North Whitehead
  • knowledge
  • temporality
  • Gilbert Simondon
  • affects
  • emotions
  • gender
  • body
  • perception
  • media studies
  • epistemology
  • Spinoza

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Mark B. N. Hansen

is the James B. Duke Professor in the Program in Literature and in the Department of Art, Art History and Visual Studies at Duke University, as well as co-founder of Duke’s pioneering Program in Computational Media Arts & Cultures and co-founder of the s-1: Speculative Sensation Lab. In work that ranges across a host of disciplines and areas, Hansen mines philosophical resources in order to explore and theorize the technological exteriorization of the human and the technical distribution of sensibility currently underway in our world today. Hansen is the author of Bodies in Code: Interfaces with New Media, New Philosophy for New Media, and Embodying Technesis: Technology Beyond Writing, and ­Feed-Forward: On the Future of Twenty-First-Century Media. In dialogue with French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, Hansen’s current research theorizes information as a process of individuation across biotic-abiotic divides and at multiple scales.
Other texts by Mark B. N. Hansen for DIAPHANES
Marie-Luise Angerer (ed.), Bernd Bösel (ed.), ...: Timing of Affect
b€ 45,00 p€ 45,00

Marie-Luise Angerer (ed.), Bernd Bösel (ed.), Michaela Ott (ed.)

Timing of Affect
Epistemologies, Aesthetics, Politics

Softcover, 344 pages

PDF, 344 pages

Affect, or the process by which emotions come to be embodied, is a burgeoning area of interest in both the humanities and the sciences. For »Timing of Affect«, Marie-Luise Angerer, Bernd Bösel, and Michaela Ott have assembled leading scholars to explore the temporal aspects of affect through the perspectives of philosophy, music, film, media, and art, as well as technology and neurology. The contributions address possibilities for affect as a capacity of the body; as an anthropological inscription and a primary, ontological conjunctive and disjunctive process as an interruption of chains of stimulus and response; and as an arena within cultural history for political, media, and psychopharmacological interventions. Showing how these and other temporal aspects of affect are articulated both throughout history and in contemporary society, the editors then explore the implications for the current knowledge structures surrounding affect today.

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