affect

effect

grammar

grammarian

is a being whose validity lies in itself and exceeds man so much so that we might say that it exists in the absence of man.

Sensations, percepts, and affects are beings whose validity lies in themselves and exceeds any lived. (465) . . . . They could be said to exist in the absence of man because man, as he is caught in stone, on the canvas, or by words, is himself a compound of percepts and affects. The work of art is a being of sensation and nothing else: it exist in itself.

is a bodily and mental state. Related to emotions and feelings, but more bodily. These include pleasure or joy, pain or sorrow, desire or appetite (i.e. Laetitia, tristitia, cupiditas).

affects are states of mind and body related to (but not exactly synonymous with) feelings and emotions, of which he says there are three primary kinds: pleasure or joy (laetitia),[1] pain or sorrow (tristitia)[1] and desire (cupiditas) or appetite.'

is a composite phenomenon. It is not just a physical reaction, but is closely connected with ideas, which in turn are closely connected with bodily reactions, affects, ands sensations.

for Freud affect is a composite phenomenon, usually comprising more than physical reactions and their associated sensations, being closely connected with ideas which become linked with bodily reactions and sensations.

is a corrective of post-structuralism's over-emphatic insistence on language.

Affect has seemed a way to supplement post-structuralism's persuasive but perhaps over-emphatic insistence on the preeminence of language and/or discourse. (Note that this interest in the extra-discursive extends to post-structuralism's most prominent practitioners... consider, for example, Derrida's insistence that the readability of a tear or a cry is not the same as the readability of a text.[1] )' (NET review of Terresa Brennen' s The Transmission of Affect) '

is a flawed theory for its romantic attachment to the fantasy of immediacy.

while I shall indeed be arguing that the major flaw besetting contemporary affect theory is its romantic (and complicit) attachment to a fantasy of immediacy or as I prefer to put it, immediation (Mazzarella 2006) I would nevertheless like to explore the possibility that the 'thing' it describes may help us to rethink the politics of public culture in a productively critical way' (294).

is a nonhuman becoming of man captured in cezanne's notion that not a 'minute of the world passes that we will preserve if we do not 'become that minute.

It is Mrs. Dalloway who perceives the town but because she has passed into the town like 'a knife through everything' and becomes imperceptible herself. Affects are precisely these nonhuman becomings of man, just as percepts including the town are nonhuman landscapes of nature. Not a 'minute of the world passes,' says Cezanne, that we will preserve if we do not 'become that minute.'6 (Deleuze and Guattari 'precepts, affects, concepts : 468)

is a physiological shift accompanying a judgement such that when I feel angry, I don't just feel angry, I feel the passage of anger through me.

by an affect, I mean the physiological shift accompanying a judgement. the notion that passions and affects are themeselves judgments is implicity in the frequent definition of affect as, to quote an example, 'any evaluative (positive or negative) orientation toward an object.' The idea that affects are judgments, or, as a new vernacular has it, attitudes (as in, 'lose the attitude') has less common currency than the notion of affects as surges of emotion or passion. But the evaluative or judgmental aspects of affects will be critical in distinguishing between these physiological phenomena and those deployed in feeling or discernment. In other words, feelings are not the same thing as affects. Putting it simply, when I feel angry, I feel the passage of anger through me. What i feel with and what I feel are distinct' (Brennen 2004:5)

is a potential increase or decrease of the power to act. It is so structured that common moral codings are disrupted. For example, pain need not be equated with the negative or with diminished power. On the contrary, pain can serve as a power to weaken or to make us stronger.

For Spinoza, affect is a potential increase or decrease of the power to act... a power that weakens or makes us stronger. In this way pain does not inherently result in a diminished power. The distinction is important here because it disrupts the the moral coding involved in equating pain with the negative.

affect, n.Definitions

affect