How do I feel about affect theory?

Gabriela Méndez Cota’s latest Substack piece describes her relationship with affect theory across a 20-year period. In the end, she offers a brilliant account of her way of making peace with affect studies, by relating it to language as an affective agency. I will not attempt to summarise Gabriela’s argument here, which is complex and has many nuances. Read it – you’ll love it. Instead, I just want to say that it prompted me to think a bit more about my relationship to or with affect theory. I’ll say a tiny bit about that now. Not exhaustive, just kind of headline stuff. During my PhD, we were all more or less consciously pressured by each other to fall into line on one or another side of the supposed divide between psychoanalytic theory and affect theory, or – as the lines were then drawn – between Lacan and Deleuze. However, none of this was particularly relevant for me, as I was on quite a ‘transversal’ journey that none around me were taking. This was unsurprising given that I was doing a PhD about the theory of politics and the political that underpinned early cultural studies, in a Centre for Cultural Studies, that was located within – and read this closely – a School of Fine Art and Art History. I had been drawn there not for art or its history, but for cultural studies. As a matter of fact, I was (and remain) pretty much a philistine when it comes to visual art; and I persist in maintaining a bit of an irrational prejudice against artists (but not historians), although I rarely find the time for it these days. As a cultural studies student, I was more organised by a Hall-Derrida-Laclau knot than the supposed Lacan-Deleuze disagreement or differend. I won’t bore anyone again with the matter of what my work was about. But, put it this way: Oedipus was irrelevant to it, so I did not see the need to be anti-oedipal; deconstruction starts from an awareness of the failure of semiotics, so I did not need to worry about whether something was representational or ‘non-representational’; and popular culture, high culture, cultural politics and politics all self-evidently work and interact in terms not just of ‘meaning’ but also ‘feeling’, just as ‘structures’ and ‘agency’ cannot be divorced from material realities like architecture, landscape, laws and lawns. So, most of the supposed oppositions between ‘poststructuralism’ – which was said to be too invested in language/meaning – and what grew up to be called affect theory – which was said to be against this, and against Oedipus, and against semiotics – all seemed like somebody else’s problem. The way one understands discourse is key here. If discourse is people chatting, and what they mean, then yes, that’s limited. But if discourse is also what people do in relation to what each other is doing, then things change. Architects, for example. They design things. Those things get made. They may even intend meanings and the try to make people feel specific things. Cathedrals, classical buildings and other crypto-fascist styles of architecture are designed to make you feel small and insignificant and full of awe and wonder and fear in the face of the greater powers. There is feeling and meaning here, in the material, in its sociality. Materiality crosscuts the supposed boundaries that allegedly demarcate(d) ‘Deleuzeans’ from ‘Lacanians’ or ‘poststructuralists’. As Gabriela discusses so clearly and so well, there has been a lot of half-reading going on in the erection of these various camps. But I have recently made a bit of a jump, and started thinking about and writing about affect, using the word affect in titles and discussing it in themes, and so on. I think I tend to speak of the ‘affective dimensions’ of this or that. And I almost always think in terms of the interface between two objects – me and my kettlebell, to evoke a familiar theme. If we were to use another contemporary but equally unhelpful taxonomical distinction, this might make me closer to the ‘new materialisms’ camp than the ‘affect studies’ camp. But this, again, is just another line drawn in the sand – not the battleground sand of two armies facing off, but the sand on a beach with its ever turning tide. I do not ‘turn to’ affect studies or to new materialisms; I do not follow deconstruction or psychoanalysis; I am not a Foucauldian or a Laclauian or a Lacanian. I search for and am drawn to texts, thinkers, ideas, arguments that help me to think more and further about issues that engage me, call to me, eat away at me, or excite me in some way. To use a phrase common in the waters we are discussing: I am certainly very interested in ‘the feels’ and the effects/affects of ‘the feels’ of certain things. Thinking about the feels of BJJ, bodybuilding, kettlebells, and more is what brought me here. And these are easily as much, if not more, about ‘the feels’ than about the meanings. But the meanings are also there, because language is there, and they shift and they play and they build and they deconstruct and reconstruct. Call it immanent critique, if you will, or call it deconstruction. As Derrida once argued, we should not think in terms of the either/or, but rather in terms of the and/and. It’s not ‘no, but’. It is ‘yes, and’. Some of the most generous thinkers from all ‘schools’ or ‘camps’ embrace such an ethos. When I was presenting the Martial Arts Studies Podcast, I once interviewed Greg Seigworth, someone who has done more to promote affect studies than anyone else on the planet. I asked him how people studying martial arts should incorporate affect theory or use affect theory to do martial arts studies. His response? He would never tell someone how they ‘should’ do such a thing. I think I feel the same.