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 ...