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geography, and neuroaesthetics, have not only emphasized the impor-

tance of affect but have called for a renewal of their disciplines based on the

findings of scientists working in the emotion field. In a short compass, I

cannot do justice to the entire scope of the literature on affect or to the full

range of issues that I find interesting; instead I shall focus on topics that

seem to me to go most directly to the heart of what is at stake in the general

turn to affect.

Let me begin by posing a simple question: Why are so many scholars

today in the humanities and social sciences fascinated by the idea of affect?

In an obvious sense an answer is not difficult to find; one has only to attend

to what those scholars say. In this paper I want to think about affect in

cities and about affective cities, geographer Nigel Thrift explains, and,

above all, about what the political consequences of thinking more explic-itly about these topics might beonce it is accepted that the political

decision is itself produced by a series of inhuman or pre-subjective forces

and intensities.5 Similarly, cultural critic Eric Shouse states that the im-

portance of affect rests upon the fact that in many cases the message con-

sciously received may be of less import to the receiver of that message than

his or her nonconscious affective resonances with the source of the mes-

sage. He adds that the power of many forms of media lies not so much in

their ideological effects, but in their ability to create affective resonancesindependent of content or meaning.6 In the same spirit, political philos-

opher and social theorist Brian Massumi, one of the most influential affect

theorists in the humanities and social sciences today, attributes Ronald

Reagans success as a politician to his ability to produce ideological effects

by nonideological means. . . . His means were affective. Characterizing

Reagan as brainless and without content, Massumi asserts that the

statement that ideologylike every actual structureis produced by op-

erations that do not occur at its level and do not follow its logic is simply a

5. Nigel Thrift, Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect, Geografiska

Annaler86 (2004): 58; hereafter IF. In this passage Thrift is quoting Lee Spinks, Thinking the

Post-Human: Literature, Affect, and the Politics of Style, Textual Practice 15, no. 1 (2001): 24.

6. Eric Shouse, Feeling, Emotion, Affect, M/C Journal8 (Dec. 2005): journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php, 2, 3; hereafter abbreviated FEA.

R U T H L E Y S is the Henry Wiesenfeld Professor of the Humanities in the

Humanities Center at Johns Hopkins University. Her recent books include

Trauma: A Genealogy(2000) and From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After

(2007). The present essay is part of a book in preparation on the history of

experimental and theoretical approaches to emotion and affect from the post-

World War II period to the present.

Critical Inquiry / Spring2011 435