Against Proper Affective Objects

Abstract

Outside of the fields of psychology and moral philosophy, the popularity of the term affect m the humanities and social sciences can most likely be attributed to the collection of Silvan Tomkins's work edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters (1995).1 While Tomkins's theoriza tion of affect is at its base a broad biological theory of how to understand and systematically categorize emotional response, controversially identifying only nine affects, cultural studies work on affect is implicitly indebted to a particular portion of his argument: script theory. It is script theory that pro vides a framework for discussing the relationship of biological response and ideology, of emotion to social construction. Biological discussions common in psychoanalytic and other psychological theories of affect are almost nonex istent in cultural studies work, as the intellectual genealogy of cultural studies projects is often Marxist and/or evolving from feminist and antiracist work. Such work is understandably skeptical of biological claims and most invested in the relationship between affect and ideology. Cultural studies projects about affect are thus always about emotion or feeling plus-, plus liberalism, plus bio power, plus nationalism, plus any articulation of ideology in action. As affect in cultural studies work is a complex of emotion plus structure, affect can be a bit of a moving target, making the relationship between texts about affect hard to discern given the vastly different objects of study and methodologies.