Affect vs. Emotion

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Affect Vs. Emotion
Steven Shaviro
Affect theorists tend to distinguish between affect and emotion. I will start with the
latter, because it is easier to explain. Emotions are personal experiences or states, like
anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise: these are the six basic
emotions catalogued by the psychologist Paul Ekman (2012), though we may well
dispute his claims that this list is either exhaustive, or invariant across cultures.1 There
are also more complex emotions, like humiliation, contempt, relief, jealousy,
exhaustion, and so on; it is unclear whether these can be broken down into
combinations of the more basic ones, or whether more specific cultural contexts need
to be involved. It also isn’t easy to delineate the boundary between emotions and
moods (which might include such conditions as melancholy, despair, and
contentment). Presumably emotions are acute and momentary, while moods are
longer-lasting and more stable, providing a general background to our more immediate
experiences. But in spite of all these difficulties, we are generally able to recognize
emotions in ourselves and others. Indeed, emotions are always attached to subjects or
selves. They are conditions that come over us, or in which we find ourselves. They are
states of mind that we experience directly. They tend to color and inflect—or even set
the conditions for—nearly all of our other perceptions and actions.
Cognitivists and evolutionary psychiatrists understand emotions largely in functional

terms. Emotions, they tell us, are shortcuts which aid us in making judgments
necessary to our survival. If something tastes disgusting, I immediately spit it out; I
might well die if I only rejected a given piece of food after having rationally determined
that it was poisonous. But it seems to me that this sort of explanation is inadequate; it
fails to account for the ways that emotions seem to take on a life of their own. They
creep up upon us, overcome us, and sometimes overwhelm us. They can be
dysfunctional and dangerous. Indeed, emotions can be (and often are) experienced—
felt, enjoyed, or suffered—for their own sake, without serving any particular function,
and entirely apart from anything that they might lead us to believe or do. Such
vicarious experience is the basis of all aesthetics. Reading a novel, hearing a piece of
music, or watching a movie is an emotional experience first of all. Cognition and
judgment only come about later, if at all.
The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016)

2
This situation is what leads affect theorists—following in the wake of such thinkers as
Spinoza (1992), William James (1981), Whitehead (1978), Deleuze and Guattari
(1987), and Massumi (2002)—to differentiate between emotion and affect.2 If emotions
are personal experiences, then affects are the forces (perhaps the flows of energy)
that precede, produce, and inform such experiences. Affect is pre-personal and pre-
subjective; it is social, or even ontological, before it is strictly individual. Affect isn’t
what I feel, so much as it is what forces me to feel. Affect in this sense is not
necessarily conscious; but conscious experience may well issue from it.
Psychoanalysis tells us of drives that impel thought but cannot themselves be captured
in thought; cognitive psychology tells us of computational processes that provide the
basis for conscious awareness, but that cannot themselves be grasped within such
awareness.
Affect theory accepts both of these formulations, but pushes them even further. It
argues that drives and cognitive processes are themselves only instances, or
specialized and limited aspects, of more general movements of affect. Affect is best
understood—in Spinoza’s formulation—as any manner in which (using the word as a
verb instead of a noun) entities in the world affect and are affected by one another.3 I
see things in the light of the Sun’s visible spectrum, and I feel with pleasure the warmth
of the Sun’s infrared rays on my skin. But I am also affected by the Sun’s ultraviolet
rays; even though I cannot sense them directly, they may well impinge upon me in the
long run, in the form of sunburn, or even of skin cancer. And as William James argued,
I don’t feel a clenching in my stomach because I am afraid, so much as this clenching
is already in itself my experience of fear.4 In this way, I already feel afraid, before I
become aware of what it is that has frightened me. Our perceptions and our emotions
are always drenched in affect, and driven by affect, even though affect per se is
irreducible to perception or emotion.
This means that affect is at once both physical and mental; or better, affect precedes
(and thereby escapes) the very distinction between the physical and the mental. Affect
is also all at once both actual and vicarious. It is actual, because it happens within me
as an alteration of my physical and psychological state. But it is also vicarious,
because—as a process of alteration—it is independent of the things or forces that
trigger it. I actually do feel fear, even when I am mistaken (that rustling in the grass
was not actually caused by the movement of a poisonous snake), and indeed even in
what I know to be fictional circumstances (as when I respond to the slasher in a horror
movie). This is why affect is so central to our experience of audiovisual media artifacts
(and indeed, of media and arts in general).

3
Steven Shaviro is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. His books
include Post-Cinematic Affect (2010), Melancholia, Or, The Romantic Anti-Sublime (2012), and
Discognition (2016).
Notes
1Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Understanding Faces and Feelings (New York: Owl Books,
2003).
2Baruch Spinoza, Ethics: with The Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected
Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992); William James, The Principles of
Psychology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981); Alfred North Whitehead, Process
and Reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978); Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand
Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis, University of Minnesota Press, 1987); Brian
Massumi, Parables for the Virtual (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002).
3 Spinoza, 103.
4 James, 1058-1097.

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www.thecine-files.

Affect Vs. Emotion

Cognitivists and evolutionary psychiatrists understand emotions largely in functional

The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016)

The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016)

The Cine-Files 10 (Spring 2016)

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