Affect

This chapter historicizes four divergent but historically contemporaneous genres of affect theory – romantic, realist, speculative, and materialist. While critics credited with the turn to affect in the 1990s wrote largely in the wake of poststructuralism from the perspective of gender and queer theory, a second wave of affect theory has exposed some of the potentially inconsistent assumptions and ambitions of the field. Neurological and economic investments in affect have generated as much anxiety about the category as enthusiasm (Tompkis, Hardt, Negri, Lazzarato, Massumi). This chapter's claim is that affect in this second wave has been stripped of its critical materialism in order to make it immediate with matter, or more specifically neurological and economic raw material. In response to this critical tendency, we reconnect affect theory with the politicization of bodies through a materialist critique of immediacy. To do so, we catalogue key interventions and divergences amongst the four genres of affect theory named above before returning finally to the problem of affect's material history.