Skip to main content icon/video/no-internet
icon backReturn to Entries

Affect

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 nonrepresentational 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 “nonideality”) 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-betweenness, 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.

Applications in Music Theory

For a simple example of how one might turn to an affective orientation in music theory, consider the dominant–tonic relation in tonal music. To turn to affect is to reorient one's 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 such as 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 dominantness hinges upon projections of tonic centricity within a larger tonal milieu.

The passage or extension of intensities might be considered through bodies—one might extend one's initial turn to affect to consider the intensive motion of an affective force through one's dominant object; by thinking of the dominant in this kind of transitional way, one 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 presubjectively and preideally. In other words, one is invoking an active notion of dominantness that presupposes an object but that is irreducible to that object. In this sort of conception one 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 one can shift from a specific cluster of objects that are allowed to act as “the dominant” to a qualitative sense of “dominantness” in all its active, intensive complexity. One can also engage recent readings of harmonic function in jazz, blues, and popular music as syntactic extensions of common-practice period tonal processes.

...

  • Loading...
locked icon

Sign in to access this content

Get a 30 day FREE TRIAL

  • Watch videos from a variety of sources bringing classroom topics to life
  • Read modern, diverse business cases
  • Explore hundreds of books and reference titles

Read next

More like this

Sage Recommends

We found other relevant content for you on other Sage platforms.

close

Have you created a personal profile? Login or create a profile so that you can save clips, playlists and searches

close
close
close Signed In to profile You are signed in as:
close
Logged in Institution Institution