“Affects are comprised of correlated sets of responses involving the facial muscles, the viscera, the respiratory system, the skeleton, autonomic blood flow changes, and vocalisations that act together to produce an analogue of the particular gradient or intensity of stimulation impinging on the organism” (Demos 19). Therefore, the infant has to rely upon intensities (a term that Massumi equates with affect). Before this gets too abstract, let’s return to the example of the infant.Īn infant has no language skills with which to cognitively process sensations, nor a history of previous experiences from which to draw in assessing the continuous flow of sensations coursing through his or her body. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations it infolds contexts…” (Massumi, Parables 30). Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. Of the three central terms in this essay – feeling, emotion, and affect – affect is the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables). The emotions of the infant are direct expressions of affect.Īn affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. Infants display emotions although they do not have the biography nor language skills to experience feelings.
We broadcast emotion to the world sometimes that broadcast is an expression of our internal state and other times it is contrived in order to fulfill social expectations. When they watched in groups, the expressions were different. When they watched alone, both groups displayed similar expressions. The distinction between feelings and emotions was highlighted by an experiment conducted by Paul Ekman who videotaped American and Japanese subjects as they watched films depicting facial surgery.
Unlike feelings, the display of emotion can be either genuine or feigned. Yet, almost every parent will state unequivocally that their child has feelings and expresses them regularly (what the parent is actually bearing witness to is affect, about which, more shortly).Īn emotion is the projection/display of a feeling. An infant does not experience feelings because she/he lacks both language and biography. It is personal and biographical because every person has a distinct set of previous sensations from which to draw when interpreting and labelling their feelings. In the remainder of this essay, I will attempt to unpack the previous sentence and provide some examples that will illustrate why the distinction I’ve made between feelings, emotions, and affects is more than pedantry.Ī feeling is a sensation that has been checked against previous experiences and labelled. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects are prepersonal. As Brian Massumi’s definition of affect in his introduction to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus makes clear, affect is not a personal feeling. L’affection (Spinoza’s affection) is each such state considered as an encounter between the affected body and a second, affecting, body … (Massumi, Plateaus xvi)Īlthough feeling and affect are routinely used interchangeably, it is important not to confuse affect with feelings and emotions.
It is a prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act. L’affect (Spinoza’s affectus) is an ability to affect and be affected. Neither word denotes a personal feeling (sentiment in Deleuze and Guattai).
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