The logic that what is not inclusive must be exclusive is another example of binary reasoning. This type of binary logic is unhelpful when it comes to appreciation of the felt quality of affective intelligence.
The excess of intensity or experiences that cannot be contained or known within reason is usually assumed in scholarly literature to belong to the realm of the uncritical, anachronistic, and/or romantic. Such excesses, however, accord with an appreciation that people are not fixed and immutable beings. Among ideas that engage with “excessive” feelings, and that are considered antiquated literary devices, are the notion of the pathetic fallacy, as well as trance theory. These explanations bridge human and nonhuman worlds to conceptualize felt experience in such a way that people are interconnected with forces in the environment outside of a reasoned framing of events. James Elkins makes the provocative point that such notions are actually “far better able to explain strong affect than well-behaved, legitimate theory” (2004, 73). Providing a critical space for the transmission of affects between museum objects and people is not to presume that artifacts are somehow people – this would be an unhelpful nonsense; rather, the point is that artifacts have an autonomy or agency that cannot be presumed, predetermined, or anticipated by a museum or entirely accommodated through “rational,” reasonable frameworks of knowledge.
Having proposed that affective intelligence can operate to reconfigure the meaning(s) intended by a museum – whether an intent is conveyed through an exhibition, a catalog, or the architecture of a gallery – it is necessary to probe in more detail what affect does. Understanding affect, however, is limited by the very act of seeking to interpret its meaning. There is also an understandable but misconstrued inclination to align affect with emotion. This is not to say that emotions are not felt or real but that they are feelings given discursive expression, for example as anger or sorrow. Affects are not the expression of a tangible emotion. As soon as an affecting experience is located within a discourse of meaning, it is a tangible something – it is (re)cognition, that is, the experience is framed by the knowledge that the experience has happened before. Acknowledging this conundrum, we might nevertheless distinguish theoretically between affect as direct sensation, and after-effects which are emotional responses. Emotional responses can be collectively understood as they function at the level of personal and communal identity, the level at which ideology operates to bind people together. What can be acknowledged is that affect is not a subjective response to something which is why it can be described as “prepersonal” or “preconscious.” The intensity of emotion that is felt prior to the enactment of an emotional response is the affective, nondiscursive realm that interests us here. Affect is deliriously unaccountable to reason.
Theorists across disciplines are interested to explore and engage with the singular quality of affective space. Brian Massumi, for example, drawing on the work of William James and Gilles Deleuze, explores the paradox or semblance of pure experience, the notion that change taking place is the unique content of experience. The observation here is that life is in the transitions; moreover, this is not separate from the object and the nonhuman world, “Whenever we see, whenever we perceptually feel, whenever we live abstraction, we are taking in nonhuman occasions of experience” (Massumi 2011, 26). Investigating art and affect, Jill Bennett (2005) describes an empathic form of vision that relates to engagements in art with traumatic memory. She observes in some contemporary art a trauma that is “not evinced in [their] narrative component or in the ostensible meaning but in a certain affective dynamic internal to the work” (Bennett 2005, 1). By focusing on the indistinctness of boundaries once determined to be fixed, engagements with affect operate to query strict demarcations between disciplines. Susan Best (2011), in a study of affect and the feminine avant-garde, addresses, for example, the interpretation of art’s affective dimension as a “methodological blindspot in art history.” She notes that this lacuna may seem strange given that art is supposedly about the generation of feeling, and seeks the reason in “the deliberate rejection of feeling” arising from interpretations of key artists and art movements of late modern art in the 1960s and 1970s (Best 2011, 1).
If affects are unpresentable and nondiscursive transitions, if they are not the possession of a knowing subject, how can they be critically evaluated? The reality is that it is probably not possible to quantify the type of knowing that might be attributed to affective intelligence. Yet it is apparent that we are ongoing physiological entities in response to multiple environments that are both internal and external to our body; we constantly shift from one affected state to another. What a person knows as “I” and “subjectivity” are outcomes of constantly moving assemblages of atomic matter beneath cognitive awareness. This is not to diminish cognitive awareness but to frame it differently. As Nigel Thrift observes, while it is dangerous to make too little of cognition, what is called consciousness is actually a narrow window of perception, which is opaque to introspection and is easily distracted (2008, 6).
The psychoanalyst and activist Félix Guattari expressed concern during the 1990s at contemporary trends to control nondiscursive tendencies (such as affect) by putting them in the orbit of the economic valorization of capital, trends that led to what he problematized as a standardization of subjectivity. This standardization of subjectivity is an outcome of turning affects and other modes of “existential apprehension” into “an exchange of information tokens … that are calculable as bits and reproducible on computers” (Guattari 1995, 104). The late capitalist utilization of affect in this way, as a means to entrench already extant systems and schemas, is at the heart of Guattari’s concern. This is reminiscent of Patricia Clough’s notion of the social as networked affectively via information, communications, and technological influences. Yet, I suggest that technological manipulation of the affective realm will have limited traction, as it is aligned not to affect but rather to emotional response. This underscores the significance of the point made earlier that affects are not emotions. An affect is intelligence between the body and the outside world that is more abstract and impersonal than emotion, which is why it operates beneath the radar of the capitalist and other ideological machines. There is a ghost within the ghost of the machine.
The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio enters the theoretical realm of affect when he complicates the relation between feeling and knowing with the observation that we are not conscious of all our feelings, and often realize suddenly “that the particular state of feeling we know has not begun on the moment of knowing but some time before” (2000, 36). Moreover, assumptions made about the six universal feelings – happy, sad, angry, disgusted, surprised, fearful – distract from the fact that most of the time we are not experiencing any of these. Teresa Brennan puts it succinctly with the observation that “Feelings are sensations that have found a match in words” (2004, 19). Damasio identifies a whole range of “backgrounds” to our lives that include fatigue, energy, excitement, wellness, sickness, tension, relaxation, surging, dragging, stability, balance, discord and so on (2000, 286). In responding to this limitless, unbounded flow of feelings, Brennan’s contention that there is actually no secure distinction between the individual and the environment becomes increasingly relevant. By extension, her argument that affects transmitted between environments alter our biochemistry and neurology provides a space to think beyond the commonsense, fixed notion of human communication and toward engaging with the generative force of nonhuman expression.
In theorizing the potential to rethink how we address the object world, the work of the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze is helpful. For Deleuze, affects are anarchical sensations that complicate the unity of identity. They do not operate to quantify structures; they do not operate as Oedipal aspects of ego or self; but, rather, affective encounters are a break in habitual thought that allows objects in the world to be imaged differently. These different images of thought rhizomatically link the body and objects into any range of “becoming other.” Becoming other is a state that is other than fixed self-awareness or identity; we might think of this as the “human” removed from “being.” The “rhizome” is a term taken from plant biology to conceptualize nonlinear processes and thoughts. It is an important aspect of rhizomatic thought that affective forms of “becoming other” arise from the generation of desire rather than being an expression of
