Laura U. Marks
Over the years I have developed a simple method for analysing movies, artworks and other phenomena by working through affective, perceptual and conceptual responses. Affective analysis is a kind of aesthetic analysis that begins by analysing affective and embodied responses. Often critical analysis begins with formal analysis of the perceptible qualities of a work; or it jumps straight to the level of discourse. Affective analysis draws thought back to the body, forcing us to generate new thoughts, or face the fact that we do not yet have thoughts. It works as a ‘reality check’ to slow intellectual responses and to guarantee that, when we arrive at them, they will be well grounded and relatively free of ideology. It may generate what Spinoza terms adequate ideas, or ideas that align the powers of the body with the capacities of the mind in a given situation. I use it in encounters with a film or artwork, in studio visits to artists, when reading and in everyday situations. Over the years I have taught it to many students in classes and workshops, and it works well in itself, or as the basis for further research.
I first realized the need for this method some years ago when I was watching Charlie’s Angels (2000). There is a scene where the brave Dylan, Drew Barrymore’s character, is betrayed by her erstwhile lover moments after they have had sex. After he and his sidekick explain the conspiracy, he shoots at Dylan. She throws up her arms and falls dramatically backward through the plate-glass window of the high hotel room: presumably she falls to her death. The film cuts to another scene and then returns to explain, in slow motion, what happened: The bullet somehow strikes not Dylan but the window behind her. She falls back, in a cascade of shattered glass. The bedsheet catches on the window ledge, saving her life; and there she hangs, grasping the sheet, now completely naked, as the conspirators leave the hotel room. During these scenes I noticed that I got goosebumps and felt aroused! Even though the film was about ‘empowered’, sexy, fighting women, my joyful affective response arose not from these representations but from an image of a woman menaced and vulnerable (though managing to survive). This startling response showed me that if I analysed only the conceptual or narrative content of the film, I would entirely miss how the film worked.
Often artworks and other cultural phenomena operate differently at the molar and molecular levels, and our responses at these levels differ as well. As Elena del Rio (2008) explains, the molar level deals with bodies as a whole; it supports identity politics, struggles against constraints and struggles for representation. The molecular level deals with energies that are not yet captured by these discourses of identity. It provides a source of energy for molar-scale struggles. Doing affective analysis we are working to identify our responses along continua from the molecular level to the molar level, from the non-discursive to the discursive; from those parts of experience that seem free of culture and ideology to those that are clearly cultural and ideological.
Affective analysis is grounded in the philosophy of Spinoza, Deleuze and Guattari, as well as existential phenomenology; its triadic method derives from the logic of C. S. Peirce. Affective analysis takes place in the body of a specific beholder, but it is objective, because it identifies empirical, sometimes physical data that arise in the aesthetic encounter. We are using our bodies to do philosophy. Affective analysis isolates the three analytical categories of affect, percept and concept (Deleuze and Guattari 1994). In Peirce’s logic, Firstness is a possibility, ‘a mere may-be’, as redness is a possibility before it is embodied in something red (Peirce 1955: 81). This is the level of affect. Peirce’s Secondness is the realm of actuality, in which one thing is constrained by another or two things struggle with one another: I identify this with perceptibles.1 In Thirdness, a third element enters to carry out a relation between two things, as in comparison, judgement, prediction and interpretation: this is the level of concept. My method consists simply of comparing the affect and percept that arise together at a specific moment in order to create a concept that adequately explains how what we perceived gave rise to, or occurred simultaneously with, that affective response (e.g. why did the image of naked suffering Drew Barrymore thrill and arouse me?). That should generate a useful concept that can direct further research. When there is no noticeable affective response, we can carry out the analysis by accounting for other kinds of embodied response, as I will explain.
Affective analysis accounts for the experience within individual sensation of forces that come from without. Guattari describes aesthetic encounters as ‘blocks of mutant percepts and affects, half-object half-subject, already there in sensation and outside themselves in fields of the possible’. Paradoxically, as he points out, affects that come from beyond are catalysed by representations (Guattari 1992: 92–93). Thus we usually experience affect, perception and concept all at once, balled up, as it were. Affective analysis draws this ball of responses into a line. Doing this might feel rather artificial, but it helps to slow the path from affect to percept to concept, which makes it possible to produce well-grounded concepts.
Before concept, perception. In the encounter with a work of art, critics are often under pressure to quickly come up with concepts. However, conceptual analysis tends to respond to an artwork as a representation. The first analysis might sound smart, but it is likely glib, reactive and unable to account for what the artwork does to the perceiver. That representational reflex, David Raskin argues, can be countered by the ‘natural, realist position that our conjunctive conceptions and perceptions are enmeshed in an emerging and material world’ (Raskin 2009: 69). Accepting for the moment Raskin’s realist position, a first step in postponing the conceptual reaction is to focus trustingly on perception: to describe without judging, in the method of phenomenology.
Another reason to focus on perception is that contemporary media technologies treat perception as merely an interface to information. Thus phenomenological methods that enlarge our sensory capacities and skills constitute a strong defence against the cultural-economic tendency to make people information processors.
Before perception, affect. Unfortunately, even our sincerest acts of perception are menaced by habit. As I note elsewhere, ‘Habit (Peirce), conventional perception (Bergson), and cliché (Deleuze) form the skin that holds an individual together in a predictable attitude’ (Marks 2010: 17). Perception is, of course, shaped by history and culture. It does not give complete access to the world; in fact, as Bergson pointed out, perception protects us from the world by focusing on survival. Perception is colonized. The reactiveness of perception is exacerbated by technologies that inform how it is possible to perceive. Moreover, while the close bodily senses of touch, taste and smell may create a temporary private Umwelt, even these senses may deliver our body to capital.2
Thus an adequate analysis needs to begin with affect, noncognitive thought, which Deleuze defines as ‘every mode of thought insofar as it is non-representational’ (Deleuze 1988). In Spinoza’s two terms often both translated as ‘affect’, affectus denotes the encounter between bodies, affectio the resulting modification ‘by which the body’s power of acting is increased or diminished, aided or restrained’ (Spinoza 1901: Part III, prop. I). Affective analysis focuses on the modification, affectio, in order to identify the encounter, affectus. Affective analysis treats the encounter as capable of opening in two directions, both potentially infinite: ‘outward’ to thought and ‘inward’ to matter (Marks 2008). Affect indicates the fold between thought and matter, which Spinoza (1901: Part II, prop. VII) argued are the same thing, considered according to different attributes.
In Deleuze’s adaptation of Spinoza, he emphasized that it need not be the whole human body that responds to an affective encounter, but rather that parts of our bodies may enter into combinations with the other entities we encounter. He and Guattari suspected that the body as a whole was overcoded by ideology. Hence they privileged the molecular nature of these encounters over the larger, molar scale at which meaning, narrative, thought and even emotion take place. This shift of emphasis to the molecular informs the influential argument of Brian Massumi (2002) that the activities of affect are best detected at the level of the autonomic nervous system.
Before affect. Autonomic responses such as goosebumps, arousal, blushing yield valuable data in affective analysis. However, in years of practice I have found that these and other autonomic responses can encode cultural ideologies. Moreover, contemporary media increasingly bypass perception to mobilize affect with unprecedented skill. Many argue that social media, computer games and other surveillant entertainments instrumentalize humans’ very synapses and contribute to the production of what Pasi Väliaho (2014) calls the ‘neoliberal brain’. For these reasons, we cannot assume that our affective responses yield adequate ideas. Therefore, we need to use critical precision to identify the relations that occur between affect, percept and concept – as well as the extra categories I suggest below of embodied response and feeling – in a given situation. Affective analysis works case by case.
Here’s how to do it:
Choose a particular moment in your experience of the artwork (all art is time-based, because we experience it in time) or event that seems especially dense, like that ball of affect-percept-concept that I mentioned, or that especially pleases, excites or troubles you. Note and set aside any initial concepts you have about it. You will be making a triadic analysis, following Peirce’s logic: in which affect is First, percept is Second and concept is Third:
Affect – Percept – Concept
However, you might need to interpolate a couple of half-steps: embodied response and feeling:
Affect – embodied response – feeling – Percept – Concept
1 Affect. Identify the affective responses or non-cognitive thoughts that you experience at that moment. First, you might have the good luck to experience autonomic nervous system responses. Shivering, goosebumps or hardened nipples; arousal; blushing; a rush of adrenaline; twitching of the forehead or upper lip; and other responses over which you have no control all constitute precious data. This response comes from something like the animal in you. However, as I noted above, even at the autonomic level our bodies are informed by culture.
It may be that you experience none of these. Thus the next step is to identify embodied responses that are likely learned and culturally grounded. Are there tears in your eyes? Is your throat constricted? Notice what else your face – that surface that gathers micro-movements but is unable to act, to move away, protect itself, or fight – is doing (Deleuze 1986: 87–88). For example, there are many kinds of smiles – a grin, a smirk, a rictus: which one is happening on your face? Similarly, there are many kinds of laughter, such as a belly laugh, snort, giggle or embarrassed laugh. (Embarrassment is very useful data!) Turn your attention to the Spinozan definition of affect as a movement to a greater or lesser power of action as you notice your bodily state. Cringing, grimacing, agitation; elation, a ‘bursting’ feeling; calm; feeling yourself open up or close down: these embodied responses are examples of Spinozan affects. Do you feel tickled? Slapped around? Such responses also call up Vivian Sobchack’s point, drawing on the argument of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, that metaphors are not arbitrary but based in embodied experience (Sobchack 2004: 53–84).
In this method I try to avoid the category of emotion, since it so often results from manipulation. However, my students’ sensitive accounts of their feelings in response to a work of art taught me that feeling is a useful category to include in the expanded notion of affective response. I use this term in an underdetermined way to indicate responses that fall somewhere between embodied response and emotion. Feelings such as wistfulness, elation and longing correspond closely to Spinoza’s terms and can still fall short of the more coded emotions telegraphed by the work under study.
2 Percept. Describe impartially all that you perceive with all your senses. Work to be as precise as possible, for it is likely the singularity of a colour, a rhythm, a shape, a scent, or another perceptible that gave rise to our affective response. At this point, a sophisticated phenomenology kicks in: one that attends to what the body becomes in the act of perception. Here we have to acknowledge that perception requires us to ‘make assumptions about the world according to the systems that have already been given, according to a world that [precede us], that is given by others’ (Fielding 2009). Perception is blurred by convention, but it is rich with singular data nonetheless. The longer you postpone recognition of what is before your senses, the richer and more precise your description will be.
3 Concept. Compare the affect and percept that arose at a given moment to move toward a concept tailored to that encounter. The well-formed concept might prove to be a Spinozan adequate idea, in that it matches the powers of the body and the capacities of the mind in a given situation (Deleuze 1988: 74, 85). In this case, affective response will give rise to an adequate idea that increases understanding. This Spinozist turn in the theory of affect draws on the thought of Deleuzian feminists Rosi Braidotti (2011), Elizabeth Grosz (2008) and Mai Al-Nakib (2013), who seek to identify practices that can increase joyful affects and develop adequate ideas.
Here’s how affective analysis works on my Charlie’s Angels example. My affective response occurred at the autonomic level: arousal and goosebumps. I described what happened narratively in the scene, but what I perceived that gave rise to those responses were the loud crash as the young woman’s body smashes backward through the window, the whole window shattering into sparkling shards, and, later, her smooth naked body as she clings to the sheet hanging from the window ledge. These were the moments that displayed her greatest vulnerability. Comparing my affective response with what I perceived, I conclude that I was aroused by a spectacularly sadistic image of a woman in peril. This response dismays me, because it suggests that I share my society’s general misogyny at a fundamental level – one that, in a Spinozan sense, inhibits my capacity to live and increase my powers. Now I can analyse Charlie’s Angels as a movie that propounds a ‘positive’ image of women in its representations but draws its power from affects of gleeful misogyny. An irritatingly large number of movies work this way. Thus my affective analysis draws to a disappointing close.
However, sometimes what we arrive at in comparing affect and percept may be, if we are honest with ourselves, nothing. This result echoes Deleuze’s observation, ‘Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life’ (Deleuze 1989: 189). At the conclusion of the careful process of affective analysis, an incapacity to think, to bring together what we perceived and what we felt, can function as a painful marker for a thought yet to come.
At this stage we need to carefully distinguish our conclusion (or lack of one) from any initial concepts we had before beginning the exercise. Our initial concepts might be supported by the affective analysis, in which case, bravo! But if the affective analysis does not support the initial concept, most likely it was not our own concept but a habit of thought. For example, we may get affective responses not to the perceptible image but to an idea that it stimulates. Similarly, we might have responded affectively not to the perceptual event itself but to personal memories and associations to which it gave rise. Both of these are noteworthy responses, but on their own they will not give rise to a strong concept. It helps to take note of these responses, set them aside for later research and begin the process anew.
4 Finally, employ the resulting triadic concept, or the painful triadic marker in lieu of a concept, as the leaping-off point for research that sheds light on the affect-percept relationship you have discovered. Let the research revise your understanding and, in Peircean fashion, produce a new object for a next round of affective analysis.
1 Here my categorization diverges from Deleuze’s in Cinema 1, which identifies perception as a degree zero, affection as First, action as Second and reflection as Third.
2 As I argue in Chapter 4 of The Skin of the Film: Intercultural Cinema, Embodiment, and the Senses (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000).
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