Affect Theory — Chris Stover

“Affect Theory” (in Music in the Social and Behavioral Sciences, 2014)

Affect theory refers to a shift of focus away from objects and toward the dynamic encounters between objects that play a large role in defining their identity. Many words have been invoked to describe affect, including agency, emotion, feeling, motive, motivation, intensity, power, sensation, and instinct. Each of these terms carries with it a complex constellation of meanings, and all mutually inform and inflect one another. Baruch Spinoza, from whom most modern notions of affect generally derive, describes affect as a non-representational mode of thought, which he contrasts with an idea, which is the kind of thought that always refers to an object (although that object may be another idea). Affect’s many forms constitute a multiplicity; the multiple nature of affect is an essential quality, and points to one of the reasons that affect resists focused definition. Above all, affect is not a thing, it is an event, and its active qualities and essential non-thing-ness (what Spinoza would call its non-ideality) constitute its active, vital identity.

Affect presupposes an object, to which it always relates, but to which it is not reducible. An affect is not merely a property of an object; it arises from encounters between bodies, as the two-way relationship to affect and to be affected. To this end it is frequently described as a middle; or in terms of its in-between-ness, marking an active space in which intensities build and transfer. Another way of thinking about the reflexive characterization of to affect and to be affected is as a transition or a passage—a dynamic space in which a body’s forces and capacities are augmented or diminished according to flows of affective relations. Since affect is irreducible to objective bodies, a notion of a body’s capacity for intensive action is necessarily open; potentially endlessly so (“no one has yet determined what the body can do” is another Spinoza aphorism). These capacities convert into affective intensities within a field that actualizes a complex of potential force-relations. This field, then, is the location of encounters between affective bodies, which are in fact constituted by those very encounters.

For a simple example of how we might turn to an affective orientation in music theory, consider the dominant—tonic relation in tonal music. To turn to affect is to reorient our perspective, away from a focus on the dominant and tonic chords as objects and toward the affective relation—the intensity, passage, or force—of each as it comes into contact with the other. On one hand there is a complex of affective intensities projecting from dominant toward tonic—a goal-oriented motion that is itself constituted by smaller affective projections like leading tone resolution and descending fifth bass motion—but on the other hand the dominant is itself defined by the constellation of its relationships to tonic; its very dominant-ness hinges upon projections of tonic-centricity within a larger tonal milieu.

We might then consider the passage or extension of intensities through bodies— we might extend our initial turn to affect to consider the intensive motion of an affective force through our dominant object; by thinking of the dominant in this kind of transitional way we can rethink it as a complex of intensive relations within the larger tonal framework. In this sense the this-ness of “the dominant” is replaced by the affective qualities, behaviors, intensities, and possibilities of “dominant” writ pre- subjectively and pre-ideally. In other words, we are invoking an active notion of dominant-ness that presupposes an object but that is irreducible to that object. In this sort of conception we might find a response to objections to reductive frameworks that strive to define all tonal motion in terms of a handful of harmonic functions: it is hard to object to closely-circumscribed conceptions of dominant— tonic motion if we can shift from a specific cluster of objects that are allowed to act as “the dominant” to a qualitative sense of “dominant-ness” in all its active, intensive complexity. We can also engage recent readings of harmonic function in jazz, blues, and popular music as syntactic extensions of common-practice period tonal processes.

Repetition also figures prominently in accounts of affect theory, and can be construed in terms of affective intensities and qualitative change. To this end we might consider the process of repetition as the ordered string <x, d(x)> where d indicates a qualitative change in the constitution of x. In an affective orientation, we mediate the objective difference between the two repeated x’s and shift our focus to that qualitative change, casting it as continuous variation: a repetition that is always in the act of re-beginning. The time of in-between-ness is qualitative time, as is felt transition, as are relations. Repetition, as a temporal relation, involves a re- engagement with the past: new-again, but always with a trace of the old; as each repetition casts new light on the past, it creates new future possibilities.The temporal constitution of affect resonates with music theoretical frameworks too. Note that in the simple dominant—tonic example given above the temporal nature the relation is essential: the capacity, or the potential, of dominant behaves as a bundle of virtual intensities ready to be converted into actual ones—into affects—in time.

In essence, a turn to affect marks a shift in perspective from the structural or formal to the active, embodied, and social. An important question remains: can we pursue an affective music theoretical orientation with the same rigor and clarity as we do formalist ones? And if we do so, does it remain affect theory, or does it idealize affect as simply another object (as in, a process-as-object)? This is a frequent and valid criticism of the efficacy of affect theory, and it speaks to the difficulty in engaging affect, and in talking about it. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari describe affect as a plane that is not related to form or figure, design or function, hierarchy or teleology, but that acts as the field in which encounters play out, forms intersect, bodies entwine, and agents act.

Affect is active; it is an event that happens. It a qualitative change in the same sense that Henri Bergson conceived, and about which a century of Bergsonians have been struggling to construe a clear and elegant language and set of accessible conceptual frames and discursive tools. A few recent music scholars have begun to address this shift in focus; we might constructively read Suzanne Cusick’s engagements with the performerly body in action, or Marion Guck’s metaphor- oriented experiential accounts, or Christopher Hasty’s projections of metric identity, as affective turns. None of these scholars engages affective capacities as such, but all of their work resonates with the shimmer of affective intensity.

A theory of affect for music involves theorizing intensity, passage, motion, in- between-ness. Furthermore, it asks us to consider these affective qualities as prior to notions of stability (objects, segmentations, forms), constituted subjects or objects (composer, performer, listener), a priori structural frameworks, or empty subject- position nodes waiting to be filled. Theorist David Lewin began to reorient the discipline in this direction with his shift of focus away from the nodes and toward the intervals that take one from one node to the next, and we would also do well to read his account of intervals and transformations from the perspective of affective impulses, encounters, and intensive thresholds.