An Inventory of Shimmers

The great barrier between affect theory and a wide readership is the carefully guarded incomprehensibility of the concept of affect. What does affect mean? This is both the subject and the source of complaint for many an affect theory essay. The nature of academia is that no one person gets to decide such things, and I certainly don't have any authority to do so from my non-peer-reviewed high horse.

In the introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, a prominent primer on the subject of affect, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg quickly associate affect with in-between-ness. Affect is difficult to talk about because our language is built to describe things and bodies rather than "the in-between-ness" between things and bodies. Seigworth and Gregg claim that affect is an event, and also a passage of forces, what I will go out on a limb and call a signal, although the authors might well disagree with that label. The authors further describe the body as being "immersed in and among the world's obstinacies and rhythms..." . In other words, they perceive a material field of potential signals through which people move (or simply persist). As a term, affect does not describe a unit of signal transmission but rather the process of signal transmission and the very existence of the communication between a person and the ubiquitous field of potential signals. The primary intervention of affect theory, as I understand it, is that consciousness cannot be separated from the material field of potential signals which interpellates it. Just as our reigning power structures interpellate the self, so too does the affective field of potential signals interpellate the person. Affect scholars are not only invested in breaking down the barriers between the mind and the body, the self and the world, but also theorizing in such a way that acknowledges the non-existence of the mind and body and self and world as discrete concepts. How do you talk about the nature of consciousness without making reference to "consciousness" and all its conceptual baggage? Hence, the circuitousness and vagueness of much of affect theory (which is then exacerbated by carelessness).

Of course, Seigworth and Gregg do use the word body.