In terms of our relations with others, Tomkins asked us to think of the
contagious nature of a yawn, smile or blush. It is transferred to others and
doubles back, increasing its original intensity. Affect can thus be said to place
the individual in a circuit of feeling and response, rather than opposition to
others. Further, Tomkins argues that we all develop complex affect theories
as a way of negotiating the social world as unique individuals.
(Hemmings 2005: 551–552)The fourth school of thought is that of Gilles Deleuze. For Deleuze, affect stands
for the unruly body’s ability to go its own way which cannot be reduced to just
social organization. For Deleuze, therefore, the focus is on bodily displacement,
the movement between bodily states, the map of intensities. As Hemmings again
succinctly puts it:
Deleuze proposes affect as distinct from emotion, as bodily meaning that
pierces social interpretation, confounding its logic, and scrambling its expecta-
tions. In contrast to Tomkins, who breaks down affect into a topography
of myriad, distinct parts, Deleuze understands affect as describing the passage
from one state to another, as an intensity characterized by an increase or
decrease in power.
(Hemmings 2005: 552)The final school of thought is psychosocial. It can be traced from Aristotle
through Hobbes to Leibniz and shares an emphasis on corporeal dynamics based
on the Aristotelian rather than the Cartesian model. It describes what might be
called a political economy of affect in that affects are not seen as having equal
purchase in all bodies. In opposition to the idea that the passions are something
that are housed in a body and shared by all human beings equally, affect consists
of the contours of a dynamic social field‘manifest in what’s imagined and
forgotten, what’s praised and blamed, what’s sanctioned and silenced’ (Gross
2006: 15). They are constituted betweenpolitically and historically situated agents.
In turn, this suggests that it makes a difference ‘not only what sort of passions are
distributed to whom, but also how they are hoarded and monopolized and how
their systematic denial helps produce political subjects of a certain kind’ (Gross
2006: 4 9).
Significantly, each of these five schools of thought involves a substantial bio-
logical component. In each case, the body is given its own powers that are outwith
social organization, sensu strictu, although obviously, in practice, it is very hard to
tell the difference. For example, take the case of bipedal motion: Ingold (200 4 )
has shown that gait is culturally striated in all sorts of ways.
Whatever the case, it is clear that affect signals a number of challenges to social
theory as currently constituted^5 but, most especially, as I have already pointed out,
a challenge to any easy dividing line between the ‘social’ and the ‘biological’ and
to the apparent roles of each. This particular chapter is therefore stimulated by
two main currents of work, both of which either set out from the biological or at
Turbulent passions 225