I finally figured out what bothers me about affect theory
In The Sonic Episteme I wrote about how feminist new materialism says that it’s recouping philosophy’s unjustly excluded other (matter), but what it actually does is double-down on old hierarchies and exclusions by reframing them in new terms. Because some strains of affect theory have similar critiques of representation and gestures towards recouping what “representation” supposedly excludes, could affect theory be understood as doing something similar? Could the project of “affect theory” as it arose in the 90s, primarily via Massumi, be understood as centering private individual experience over and above transformational class consciousness?
Before I get to the affect theory, let me set up the terms of my analysis.
In “Can The Subaltern Speak,’ Guyatri Spivak highlights the play between two senses of “representation” in European political philosophy. As Spivak notes in her reading of Deleuze, “two senses of representation are being run together: representation as ‘speaking for’, as in politics, and representation as ‘re-presentation’, as in art or philosophy” (70): representation as in symbolizing is conflated with representation as in speaking for (like your Representative does for you in Congress). Or, put differently, representation in the sense of a portrait is being run together with representation in the sense of a proxy; Spivak turns to the difference between the German terms “vertretung…representation within the state or political economy” (a proxy) and “darstellung…representation as in art or philosophy” (a portrait) to clarify the distinction. In both portraits and proxies, there’s a re-presentation of a person/constituent in the form of an image or an elected official.
Liberal representational politics are an example of this conflation between portrait and proxy. This approach takes the depicted presence of, say, white women or people of color on a corporate board or in a movie as evidence of political parity: portraits of diversity are conflated with proportional political enfranchisement. The particular slippage Spivak is concerned with in her analysis is Deleuze’s claim that “a theory is like a box of tools. Nothing to do with the signifier…There is no more representation; there is nothing but action” (cited in Spivak, 70). Deleuze is trying to claim that philosophizing is not abstract, but a concrete practice – it is neither a portrait of or proxy for “real life”, it IS real life. This is of course to some degree true – doing philosophy is a practice with concrete affordances; however, philosophizing is also abstract – it is a practice of abstraction. According to Spivak, Deleuze wants philosophizing to be a concrete, non-abstract practice so he can equate his work as a theorist with the manual labor of the factory worker. If the intellectual’s labor is identical to that of the working classes, then, so the story goes, the intellectual can speak for the silenced working classes. Thus, in depicting the figure of “the working classes” and “valoriz[ing] the concrete experience of the oppressed” (Spivak 70), Deleuze actually functions as a proxy for them. In claiming to move past “representation” and get directly to “action,” Deleuze performs a collapse of the gap between subject and portrait, signified and signifier, constituent and proxy. This collapse then lets him equivocate between portraiture and proxy such that his description of oppressed groups he isn’t a part of can appear to function as their enfranchisement. Spivak’s point is that this just re-centers the Western intellectual and does nothing to enfranchise working class people: “the intellectual within socialized capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international division of labor” (69). Rather than leveling the difference between the intellectual class and the working class, Deleuze’s claim to be a proxy for the working class actually reinforces that division of labor it claims to eliminate.
Turning to Marx, Spivak suggests that the way to “develo[p] a transformative class consciousness from a descriptive class position” (72) lies not in valorizing the private “concrete experience” of individual laborers, but “remains within the feeling of community that belongs to national links and political organizations” (72). Class consciousness in the vertreten sense requires a representation/Darstellung of some common interest. This picture of a shared common requires abstraction from concrete individual experience to something like what you could call a “general interest” or “sensus communis” or “distribution of the sensible” or whatever your favorite philosopher has called it. You might even call such abstraction “mediation” by symbols that have a commonly-agreed-upon meaning. I will return to this point later, but here I just want to note that instead of taking this route with representation, the one that points to “the feeling of community”, Deleuze goes instead in the direction of private individual “concrete experience.”
This relationship between political representation and artistic representation that Marx calls on constitutes what Ranciere calls the “metapolitical” regime of political philosophy. As Ranciere argues, “Clearly it was Marx who provided the canonical formula for metapolitical interpretation, especially in The Jewish Question” (Disagreement, 82); that essay marks the difference between “political emancipation,” or the civil freedom of religion, and “human emancipation,” which is the day-to-day equality among people of different religions. While Western liberal democracies like the U.S. and France legally separate church from state and establish a civil freedom of religion, both nations are normatively Christian ones where non-Christians are socially marginalized; there is a disjunction between what the law says and what happens in private life. Ranciere calls that disjunction “the gap between any political process of naming or inscribing in relation to the realities subtending them” (82), and metapolitics is the idea that this “gap between names and things” (82) is a necessary feature of politics, and the job of the political philosopher is to diagnose that gap — a.k.a. “Ideology” – as such. Here, both portraits and proxies are understood in terms of the indexical correspondence (or rather, lack thereof) between names and things, and political philosophy polices that failure of accurate re-presentation. Spivak’s point is that Deleuze’s conflation of portrait and proxy closes that metapolitical gap between names and subtending realities in a way that continues to exclude working-class people from representing themselves.
For Raniere, political philosophy is a reactionary force that distracts us from the actual performance and enactment of politics, which he understands as the radical reconfiguration of an episteme by introducing a perceptible instance of what that regime supposedly constitutively excludes from perception/representation. For example, in focusing on whether the name of a class is an in/accurate representation of its constituents, political philosophers reinforce or “police” rather than revolutionize this particular way of perceiving who counts as a member of society. As Ranciere explains,
Class is the perfect example of one of those homonyms over which the counts of the police order and those of the political demonstration are divided. In the police sense, a class is a grouping of people assigned a particular status and rank according to their origins or their activity…In the political sense, a class is something else entirely: an operator of conflict, a name for counting the uncounted” (83).
Or, in the political sense, “class” names what a particular episteme supposedly cannot name, the part which cannot be represented (either politically or artistically) in that episteme. Metapolitics is one way to “police” the meaning and function of class by framing it as merely a name for a thing. Even though his rejection of so-called “representation” would appear to be a move away from the metapolitical regime, Deleuze’s conflation of portrait and proxy does exactly this: it re-installs the existing hierarchical class order while eliding the formation of a “transformative class consciousness.” Reducing vertreten-style “representation” to the immediate depiction of private “concrete experience”, Deleuze excludes the possibility of working-class people developing a transformative political class consciousness.
Deleuzian-style affect theory from the 1990s does the same thing. Dismissing “representation” as some red herring diverting our attention from the purported ontological truth and immediacy of affect, this style of affect theory redirects attention away from the shared, mediated world of Vertretung-as-transformative-class-consciousness and towards private individual experience. Ruth Leys has already called this out in slightly different terms in a 2011 article in Critical Inquiry. She writes,
The problem is that by adopting [the] separation of the affects from our ideas or beliefs and by treating the affects as nonintentionalist states…affect theorists who share this approach implicitly deflat[e] or eliminat[e] ideological disagreement over what we believe in favor of a pluralistic-ontological emphasis on what we feel or who we are, a position that allows concern with identity to trump disagreements over our beliefs. (466)
Like Deleuze’s valorization of the “concrete experience” of the working classes over the philosophers’s abstractions, the affect theorists Leys studies reject “representational meaning” in favor of immediate affective intensity; just as Spivak notes that this move in Deleuze precludes the formation of Vertreutung-as-transformative-class-consciousness, Leys notes that it focuses on private individual experience (‘what we feel or who we are”) to the exclusion of something approaching what Ranciere would call politics – disagreement, the coming-to-consciousness of the class whose exclusion from representation coheres the current order of representation.
Reading Leys alongside Spivak and Ranciere suggests that the ideological function of affect theory in the mid-to-late 1990s was to valorize private individual experience over Vertreutung-as-transformational-class-consciousness. This was not a radical recuperation of what philosophy has unjustly ignored; it was a reactionary reorientation of philosophy towards the emerging neoliberal/neconservative “family values” consensus around privatization and private individual responsibility. Leys has done a lot of the initial legwork here, so I’ll summarize her analysis.
First, Leys finds that affect theorists tend to create a false dichotomy between abstraction and immediate bodily experience: “The whole point of the turn to affect by Massumi and like-minded cultural critics is thus to shift attention away from considerations of meaning or “ideology” or indeed representation to the subject’s subpersonal material-affective responses (450). There is intellectual abstraction, or representation, on the one hand, and non-representational bodily affect, on the other. And instead of understanding that there could be forms of non-propositional or embodied abstraction, “it is only by adopting a highly idealized or metaphysical picture of the mind as completely separate from the body and brain to which it freely directs its intentions and decisions that they can reach the skeptical conclusions they do” (455). Just as Deleuze creates a false dichotomy between “abstraction” and “concrete experience” by failing to note that manual labor also involves abstractions, the affect theorists Leys studies fail to account for the fact that the mind can work in non-representational abstractions, just as the body can learn to perform abstractions (such as gender!) as a matter of habit (that’s literally the thesis of Foucaultian feminism from Sandra Bartky to Judith Butler). Leys mentions music at two moments in her article, and they each clarify exactly how affect theory overdraws the distinction between mind and body. First, she explains that “skilled pianists are not consciously aware of the innumerable movements their fingers must make during a performance, but this does not make those movements unintentional or negate the fact that the pianists in-tended to play the music” (455). A scale such as the Bb major or G minor scale is an abstraction: it represents the execution of an algorithm about pitch interval order beginning at a particular pitch and in a particular mode. However, after years of practice I learned to play these scales (and many, many more) without having to rely on anything but muscle memory. I was executing an abstraction without consciously thinking about it. Whereas scales are representations of a proposition not unlike a sentence, classical music is also like the paradigmatic example in the Western philosophical tradition of non-propositional or non-representational abstractions. In the 19th century, the idea of “absolute music” named music that lacked conceptual or representational content. For example, whereas Smetna’s “The Moldau” was explicitly a sonic depiction of the river of that same name, Beethoven’s violin concerto wasn’t about anything other than the music itself. Just because it lacks words or representational content doesn’t mean that music lacks abstraction – like there’s a whole academic discipline of music theory that has a huge and growing way of talking about the kinds of rhythmic, harmonic, timbral, dynamic, and other abstractions that make a piece of music meaningful. However, as Leys finds,
Music is often cited by affect theorists as exemplifying the power of the affects. For example, Shouse suggests that music provides perhaps the clearest example of how the “intensity of the impingement of sensations on the body can ‘mean’ more to people than meaning itself.” He observes in this regard that “‘music has physical effects, which can be identified, described and discussed but which are not the same thing as it having meanings, and any attempt to understand how music works in culture must . . . be able to say something about those effects without trying to collapse them into meanings’” (“FEA,” ¶13). Here Shouse puts everything that is not a question of “meaning,” defined in some highly limited sense, over against the body or affect. What seems wrong or confused about this is the sharpness of the dichotomy, which operates at once with a highly intellectualist or rationalist concept of meaning and an unexamined assumption that everything that is not “meaning” in this limited sense be- longs to the body. This too is a false dichotomy, one that—in spite of a professed hostility to dualism—threads its way throughout much of the new literature on affect (458).
Just because musical abstractions aren’t always the same kinds of abstractions that words are – they don’t indexically refer to a signifier or ‘meaning’ – doesn’t mean they aren’t abstract! The so-called “brown note” is a mythical frequency that supposedly causes your bowls to reflexively release, like when you reflexively kick when the doctor hits your knee with their hammer. But the brown note is NOT music. Music is not an example of affect in the strict Massumian sense Leys critiques in her article. It necessarily works with abstractions (rhythm and meter are abstractions!), just maybe not representational ones.
If this dichotomy is so obviously false, then why are affect theorists like Massumi so committed to it? Why do they WANT it to be true? (Sorry, I’m always a Nietzsche-Foucault girl at heart, what’s the will-to-truth here etc etc) Building on Leys, I think that the will-to-truth here has to do with privatization and the elision of Vertreutung-as-transformative-class-consciousness. For example, Leys suggests in a footnote that William Connolly treats
political views [as] nothing but the expression of purely personal preferences, so that preferring democracy to despotism is like preferring tea to coffee. Connolly, Thrift, and other affect theorists can thus be seen as replacing a concern with disagreement over political beliefs with an appeal to affective differences that they take to be independent of belief or meaning. The result is that when people have different affective responses, they don’t disagree, they just are different. From this (to my mind untenable) pluralist point of view, democracy is not a normative value at all but just a personal taste, and what the political activist is seeking to do is subliminally influence or manipulate others through the use of images and other tactics into sharing his or her likings while remaining pluralistically open to the idea that different persons may simply have different inclinations (452).
According to Leys, affect theorists like Connolly reject ideas of shared standards like norms in favor of private individual preference; these preferences seem to be treated like consumer choices in a market. (It’s also worth noting that the description Leys gives in her last sentence in that block quote of “subliminal influence or manipulation” through “images and other tactics” is basically what surveillance capitalism does today, “nudging” people toward certain behaviors by, for example, recommending them content that they are likely to buy, share, or react to.) As Leys puts it later in the article, “The effect is to replace the idea of one’s intentions with regard to objects or of the meanings those objects might have for one with the idea of the singularity of one’s affective experiences, which is to say with the idea of one’s difference from all other subjects” (465). At the level of affect, one is not a member of a community with shared norms and standards, but a private individual with non-political preferences. For example, Leys’s take on Eve Sedgwick’s work on affect clearly points out how Sedgwick treats affect as a matter of private difference in elision of any sense of transformational class consciousness;
In Sedgwick’s analysis shame emerges as an affect that ensures each person’s absolute difference from the other. According to Sedgwick, following Tomkins’s approach to the affects, what matters in the experience of shame is not your conscious or unconscious wishes or intentions toward some object but your subjective feelings in all their singularity and difference from those of others. Shame thus transforms and produces identity, without any moralism and indeed without giving identity any specific content; it is a means for creating (queer) identity as the experience of pure difference (465)
Shared experiences of shame could be used to build transformational class consciousness – isn’t this kind of what the use of “pride” could at its best be about, countering shared experiences of shame with collective consciousness of queer people as a class? But as Leys reads Sedgwick, that move towards shared experience and transformational class consciousness is foreclosed in a focus and valorization of private difference.
Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect” was published in 1995 – one year before the Welfare Reform act, two years before Tony Blair gets elected. Reading Leys, it’s not hard to see affect theory as an academic manifestation of the very sorts of privatization Clinton and Blair enact in American and British policy. If we follow Leys’s analysis and take affect theory’s misreading of some scientific studies alongside an overdrawn dichotomy between mind and body, we can then ask: what motivates these errors? What function do these misreads and missteps serve?
They allow affect to appear, as Massumi puts it, “after ideology” (104), as progressing past the metapolitical structure of the correspondence between symbols and the purported “concrete experience” that they abstract away from and towards something more direct and immediate that purportedly recuperates the baby that such abstraction throws away with the representationalist bathwater. More simply, in claiming to be after ideology, affect theory presents itself as progressing past old-fashioned Modernist metapolitics and towards some new thing. This is not the “postdemocratic” regime of statistics that Ranciere talks about in the next chapter of Disagreement, but something more like a constituent of the Sonic Episteme. For example, Massumi describes an affective media ecology where force transfers through “induction and transduction” (104); I have already written a whole book about how these sorts of metaphors produce the same neoliberal relations that Ranciere attributes to the regime of “postdemocratic” statistical mis/representation.
Coming “after ideology,” affect theory posits a new relationship between vertreten and darstellen. As Hegel notes in the “ethical substance” section of The Phenomenology of Spirit, the atomistic individual of liberal civil society can be equal to all others precisely because the move from the realm of private difference to the public sphere abstracts away all the concrete particularities that make one citizen different from another. Metapolitics is precisely the practice of pointing out this gap between public and private, between the conceptual abstraction and “concrete experience.” Following Leys, we could say that for affect theory there is neither portraits nor proxies, just intensities of force that are felt as private ontological difference that operates below the merely ontic plane of politics. This is not a progressive recuperation of what philosophy has unjustly excluded, it’s just a way to update philosophy to make it more compatible with emerging neoliberal epistemes. Work such as Steve Shaviro’s Post-Cinematic Affect explicitly connects affective abstractions to neoliberal market logics.
Leys’s analysis suggests that it’s worth including affect theory along with what Marie Thompson has identified as the “ontological turn” philosophies (OOO, new materialism, speculative realism) whose valorization of “a pre-conscious terra nullius, unmediated by social order…has some troubling resonances with retrograde socio-political tendencies”. In particular (and like Thompson), I am concerned that the move to a pre-social, ontological and not ontic layer of “affect” is a way to elide the operation of whiteness (among other things). For example, at the end of “The Autonomy of Affect,” Massumi turns to Ronald Reagan as an example of a figure who works beyond ideology at the level of affect:
What is astonishing is that Reagan wasn’t laughed and jeered off the campaign podium and was swept into office not once but twice. It wasn’t that people didn’t hear his verbal fumbling or recognize the incoherence of his thoughts. They were the butt of constant jokes and news stories. And it wasn’t that what he lacked on the level of verbal coherence was glossed over by the seductive fluency of his body image. Reagan was more famous for his polyps than his poise, and there was a collective fascination with his faltering health and regular shedding of bits and pieces of himself…His means were affective (102).
From the perspective of 2026, the figure of a fumbling, feeble, and verbally incoherent aging Republican U.S. President is all too familiar. Whereas Massumi claims that public must gloss over Reagan’s representational incoherence because they are working at the level of extra-ideological affect, I have argued that Americans gloss over the current President’s incoherence because his extra-propositional communication is ideological in a very specific way:
Representational or “ideological”/metapolitical abstractions aren’t the only kind of abstractions that exist–they are however the dominant way abstractions have been figured in mainstream Western philosophy (i.e., as propositional content). To argue that something extra-representational is extra-ideological naturalizes the way that power relations are transacted through extra-representational abstractions. Eliding the issue of whiteness in Reagan’s performance, Massumi short-circuits his ability to come to transformational class-consciousness about whiteness.
Though this strain of Deleuzian affect theory presents itself as something like the overcoming of metapolitics by moving below or beneath “ideology,” to the extent it denies that extra-propositional abstractions exist and that they can be used to create the “feeling of community” necessary for forming transformational class consciousness, it just reworks classically liberal metapolitics into what Jeffery Nealon has called the neoliberal “empire of intensities.” As such, this strain of affect theory is another front of 90s privatization, like the Telecom Act and the Welfare Reform Act, but operating at the level of epistemology and aesthetics.