more thoughts about Affect / Language

Back in February I was trying to work out some thoughts about the connections between language and affect and what I found troubling about the preeminence of Language in so many discussions of Affect. Well, now I have more thoughts to try and get out of myself in some quasi-coherent way and so, here we go…

Let's assume, for now at least, that so far as the account of Language derived from structuralism; langue/parole, signifying chain, the X/Y of the metaphorical and metonymical axes is adequate to its object of study. [I am not sure about that, but just for the moment, let us take it as given.] This model when plotting utterances of whatever sort does so in a way that we might reasonably think of as two-dimensional. Speech unfolds in one direction, forward in time. The other dimension is provided by the axis of substitution.

Many thinkers who are trying to cope with the question of how affect relates to signification are incorporating it directly into the signifying chain in some fashion. To give but two; Laclau ties it directly to signification arguing that "affect requires signification"; Johnston does this differently, arguing that "affects are signifiers." I will not replay here my critique of Laclau's position, but I do not think that affect can be shown to require signification and that the laugh of the infans is proof enough of that for this moment. Johnston's position is much better argued and I am not yet ready to try to engage it fully just yet. I will say that I agree with a great deal of what he says but still feel as if something is missing. What is missing I turn to now…

Let's say that three friends attend a dinner party making a total of 10 people. The three friends are dispersed around the table and talking to various others as the meal progresses. Many things are said, now and then everyone is listening to a single person but often enough things break into smaller side-conversations. There are any number of moments when the three friends are all aware of things that are said which are a bit problematic but none of them is in a great position to make a critique of these things without breaking the code of the dinner party. When it is over and the three are riding home together they begin to collectively process the evening and those moments when each was uncomfortable with the implications underpinning some other person's speech.

Now, let's assume the three are at home, continuing to recount things they heard or thought and one of the three reveals that they were very angry about something, and in telling this they release a great deal of negative affect. Here I want to tread lightly as I am unsure of the best choice of vocabulary. Does 'release' imply too much conscious intention? Would it be better to say that one 'gives off' affect? [We'll return to this below, just flow with me for now]. So one of the three is quite worked up and they state their criticism very strongly and then tired from the dinner and the discussion they go to bed. We are left with two now who remain in place. But now, things are very different. They are both left talking about their night still, but grappling as much with the content of the absent 3rd's criticisms, but also with the "affect bomb" that was set off at the same time.

It seems to me that while, yes, the 3rd did give an affect-laden chain of significations, that affect does not inhere only in those significations, rather that it colors the signifying chain. [Again, terminology alert - to be resumed below]. I, as one of the three friends (one of the two who remained behind when the 3rd left) was very conscious of change in 'mood' which was quite pervasive. I and the other spoke about the criticisms, about the night overall and about things unrelated to the night entirely, but it seemed very much to me that the tone (mood, vibe, coloration, etc) of the discharge of so much affect had colored all that came after, even the purely humorous discussion that was no longer about the evening at all.

This example, though it is what prompted my thoughts about this, is perhaps not the best one to make the point that I am making. But the thing I am pointing at is the way that someone's mood, their "affective charge" can and does impact others' affects. Now the thinker who favors language as model here will attribute this to signifiers. The person in the bad mood we must recognize as being in a bad mood and so there must be signs of this which we read to make this attribution. If it is countered that we may not always be aware of these signs, then perhaps the signifying chain where these details are registered is unconscious. Maybe. But I wonder still.

If the pre-linguistic child, the infans is productive of what seem very much like affects, smiles, laughter, fright, worry, etc. Then it would seem that affects precede language. I am sure that once the child becomes a speaking being that all of that is over-coded with signifiers. But I have a hard time believing that because of this an affect simply becomes just another signifier.

It seems that affects are at times much more nebulous, that we can not know what this 'weird mood' we are in means or what caused it. We may manage to satisfy ourselves about that by means of a statement at some point ("I guess I feel ______") but other times the mood simply changes and we never are able to really articulate what was happening affectively.

If we consider a sentence like "my father just died" we have pretty clear access to the basic signification, the meaning of this sentence. But as a written text without other detail or context we have no bearings on the affect involved, all that we can do is project an affect upon the statement. Affect can surely enter the signifying chain if someone says this to us and we reply by saying "you say that like you are happy about it," that is, if we explicitly enter the term "happy" into the signifying chain to name the affect which we felt in some way by virtue of the way that the sentence was uttered. In that case a signifier of an affect is present in the chain, but does this give any grounds for assuming that the affect is a signifier? In the famous 'the word is the murder of the thing' quote, is affect not the thing? Would "happy" not have to be utterly distinct from that to which it refers in order to be able to refer at all?

I know that there is much else to be done to shore up this general line of thinking about affects, but this at least gives my reasons for being dissatisfied with it being incorporated fully into the signifying chain. What remains is to ask what can be said about affect as distinct from signification and that will be difficult. My word choices for this are all tentative, but the one term which keeps reemerging as I try to think this all through is "colors." I think there is something valid in claiming that affects color the signifying chain. But this doesn't help all that much with trying to conceptualize this. I find I am also attracted to metaphors of charge and discharge, and certainly this has vernacular support, as when we say that an question is, for someone or other, very "affectively charged." In saying something like this we seem to be saying that the question is not one that people can seem to deal with in a non-affect-laden way, that emotions get in the way of reasons, etc. I do not know that I would be willing to accept any absolute distinction between reason and emotion, but neither would I assume that they are coextensive.

If the characterization of the structuralist view of language as two dimension has any merit, might we propose that affect is something like a third dimension? One that intersects in many ways with the two but that remains nonetheless of an other order. This is at least my intuition about this, though it is one that is sorely in need to a better conceptual grounding.