Affect has, of course, become a term which is sprinkled through many recent
writings, often adding nothing much more than a mere cultural frisson or, even
worse, a highly questionable means of choosing choice which omits, ignores or
diminishes many of the negative and obvious links to the exercise of power
(Hemmings 2005).^2 But that does not mean that affect can therefore be written
off as just a passing intellectual fad for it addresses real issues about fundamental
understandings of what constitutes the ‘social’, and, indeed, whether the ‘social’
is an adequate descriptor of the work of the world.
Broadly speaking, affectis an attempt to avoid an easy psychologism. Put most
simply, as in, for example, a Spinozan interpretation, it refers to complex, self-
referential states of being, rather than to their cultural interpretation as emotions
or to their identification as instinctual drives, although, to muddy the waters, it is
clear that affect is not easily separated off from either emotion or drive and that a
good part of the current rampant confusion in the literature derives from the
difficulty of making such easy dividing lines. Thus, we might say, in line with
Griffiths (199 7 ), that emotionsare everyday understandings of affects (such as the
Western folk model that understands emotions as introspective sensations),
constructed by cultures over many centuries and with their own distinctive vocabu-
lary and means of relating to others. In a sense, they are a kind of folkbiology, a
set of continually emerging beliefs about efficacy. The central Western concept of
emotion is unlikely to be of more use than this because it assumes that one process
category underlies all human behaviours, and can somehow explain them. But
there is no evidence to suggest that this is the case.
There is no one process that underlies enough [human] behaviour to be
identified with emotion. Emotion is like the category of ‘superlunary’ objects
in ancient astronomy. There is a well-designed category of ‘everything outside
the moon’ but it turns out that superlunary objects do not have something
specially in common that distinguishes them from other arbitrary collections
of objects.
(Griffiths 199 7 : 7 9)Drives, in contrast, arise out of basic biological functions, such as hunger, sex,
aggression, fear and self-preservation. They are often viewed as the source of many
affects but, unlike drives, affects can be transferred to a wide variety of objects in
order to be satisfied.
What seems certain is that any consideration of affect has to involve merging
two collections of analytical objects that have been conventionally kept apart,
namely ‘the social’ and ‘the biological’ (S.J. Williams 2001). As Brennan puts it:
This is not especially surprising, as any enquiry into how one feels the others’
affects, or the ‘atmosphere’, has to take account of physiology as well as the
social, psychological factors that generated the atmosphere in the first place.
The transmission of affect, whether it is grief, anxiety, or anger, is social or
psychological in origin. But the transmission is also responsible for bodilyTurbulent passions 221