Emotion, behaviour and power to move somebody is bandied about as a platitude in many different ways.-However there is a bunch of different meanings, depending upon who the thinker or critique of the work actually is.
The notion of affect can be illustrated quite well by a video created by two brothers but describe how the use of table full of mousetraps can be set off like a critical reaction or chain reaction. (See the you Tube video of mouse trap reaction by slow Mo Guys).
This mouse trap chain reaction seems to be a useful mechanism to demonstrate the kind of things that occur as a change reaction of affectation. This is partly to do with the expectations or tensions being set up before the actual event, then the event which appears to be cataclysmic, and then the subjectivity of time associated and with regards to it stretching and compressing. In filming the sequence and the exposure of its temporality causes your own frame of mind to appear to slow down in time or speed up depending on the reaction.
An alternative example may be given by the work of John Malarkey. He created the two hour film composed of 15 minute into Segments of the Bourne Ultimatum with sections of Bella Tarr's 'Satantango'. By combining very fast-moving action with extremely slow repetitive motions interlaced with each other, creates the deep or reconfiguration of our own viewing thresholds. From this Malarkey suggests the rich, to temporal actuality of films can be changed.
Affect theory can be studied-"the affect theory reader" by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J Seggworth is a good book to start with, and another "Parables of the Virtual" by Brian Massami goes into detail about movement, affect and sensation.
Baruch Spinoza, (1632 - 1677) the Dutch Philosopher, in his book entitled "The ethics" (1677) said "I shall consider human actions and the desires in exactly the same manner, as though I were concerned with lines, planes and solids."
Spinoza was the first philosopher to fold everything up into a "one must" and then write about it in the very cold dry and curiously detached way. Spinoza was writing during a period of very religious doctrine and culture, but this time was also at the start of the materialistic contemplation. He wrote of "Deus Sive Natura" (God or nature), as such Spinoza was talking into a framing of one single conception of God and all nature as being as one entity. The omnipotent, omnipresent, omniscience is often quoted as a singular entity in religion.
Spinoza also applies this to the body and the mind as an embodiment of the same substance. Because Spinoza was writing specifically about the oneness of God and nature he was branded an atheist and heuristic and as such he was excommunicated from the Jewish faith as a result (Amsterdam 1656) which resulted in the Jewish word "cherem" (which means to be cursed, or ostracised, - 'a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books'. (Wikipedia.com, 2014).
During this time in Spinoza's life, everybody was at odds with him. The theology theorists treating him like a heretic, but also the scientists of the day, see him as a religious crank.
Nevertheless, over time, his theories and writings led to the idea of 'affect'.
There are two common uses of the word affect.
- In psychology, it is aligned to an expression as a synonym for passion, sentiment, mood, feeling or emotion.
- The alternative use of the word affect is used in art. In this case the notion is that we intertwine philosophy with psychology and focus on the 'transmission' through the media or channels etc.
Therefore in art there has emerged in the sense to further traditions of the use of the word;
the first one being affect as the embodiment of force that influences the mind , but then also
secondly, the notion taken from Spinoza, that thought is a route into the relationship of affect of body and cognition (thought in itself).
Affect, is 'a real worldly event that changes our cognition' (for example pleasure or pain); it is the way to think 'about' the object, in other words, it [the object] shifts our judgement.
Going back to those great thinkers in Greek philosophy, Aristotle and Plato, and then later Descatres Spinoza and many others later, have spoken and written in philosophical terms about affect. Aristotle discusses pleasure and pain, our "condition" is affected and thus judgement shifts on the basis of an affect.
Descartes; - he suggests that affects (passions and emotions) are the "perceptions, feelings or emotions of the soul which relate specifically to it (the soul) and which are caused, maintained and fortified by some movement of the (animal) spirit.
But the greatest theorist seems to be Spinoza, who achived so much in seting the way for later 18th century enlightenment to come.
Much of both modern day media theory and advertising is derived from this tradition, which focuses upon imitation (mimesis).
In a further sense, this can also be split on to to further headings, that of tragedy and that of music. Both of these, around those the human spirit. Tragedy imitates actions which excite pity and fear, whereas music changes our cognitive feelings and moods stop
The criticisms of this notion, points out that there must be "an object" in order for the focus to be made upon it. The music critique and composer Eduard Hanslick (1825 -1904) argues the point that there must be an object of attention. However, he struggles in the explanation of "music" as one has to ask, where is the object in that?
In another commentary Clement Greenberg discusses avant-garde and Kitsch. He states that Kitsch has little object of sources for affect to take place, whereas in avant-garde, such as Picasso's works of Cubism, the viewer is displaced from the familiar, and therefore transmits a new kind of feeling. He compares the artist Reppin (the Kitsch) with Picasso. The easy to view picture painting takes little effort from the viewer to interpret. However the avant-garde Cubism is much less straightforward in how the affect can emerge.
The dispute over affect and post-modernity was theorised by Frederick Jamieson (the warning of affect in post-modernity). Or example in Edvard Monks painting "The Scream", compared to Andy Warhol's "Diamond Dust Shoes" is considered in the same way that affectation (in humans) has waned since the advent of Edvard Monks "Scream" in which the image is an exemplary demonstration of the way that affect works in modernist images.
Brian Massuni, rejects Jamieson and suggests that in post-modernity, it is belief that has waned, but not affect. Massuni thinks that if anything, we have a surface of affect. The problem is that there is no cultural, or theory, or indeed a vocabulary that is specific to affect. He goes on to suggest that the combining of the works of Bergson and Deleuze and Spinoza, to argue that "affect is a suspension of affect reaction circuits and linear temporality in a "sink" which may be called Passion".
This circuit, the centre of "in determination, and time" are as intertwined as a swirling vortex. In affect theory, we get this blurred vision of what all the elements of the subject actually are. These are completely mashed together.
So in summary, affect in its contemporary parlance and notion, when applied to an art object, is an extremely complex outcome from all our senses working together, initially from the starting point of sight, but equally as important are sound and hearing, smell, flavours and taste, and of course touch. Each of our five senses can independently operate from the others. Contemporary art often attempts to be linked these senses from the familiar. Our experience, or perhaps our expectation of an experience, is therefore shifted and as a result, an unsettling response comes through.
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