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  • One of the hall-marks of affect is ‘In-between-ness’.
… the most fundamental insight of affect theory: that no embodied being is independent but rather is affected by and affects others bodies, profoundly and perpetually as a condition of being in the world.

— Ahern, A Feel for the Text. (2018)

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The challenge for researchers is that affect is not something, but rather is “in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter”; rather than housed in or controlled by the individual, it “arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.

— Ahern, The Affect Reader. (2010)

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  • ‘Affect’ as dynamic – emotions not static but in process – changing as they move between bodies.
  • Robert Solomon recommended ‘thinking of emotions as acts’, as ‘something we do, not just have’.
  • 'Affect’ captures maybe better than emotion that embodied aspect of experience (something felt before it’s understood).

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References
  • Ahern, Stephen. (2018) ‘Introduction’, A Feel for the Text, 5. Springer.
  • Ahern, Stephen. (2010) Citing Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, The Affect Reader, 8. Duke University Press.
Narrative
Narrative
Resistance
Resistance
Poetics
Poetics