Affect

Holger Schulze

Just arrived in this new city, I tried to find my way through the unfamiliar railway station. This country smells different. Is this due to unique fossil fuels being burned, different cleaning detergents, or distinct types of alcohol or tobacco being consumed? I could not understand the local language as swiftly as I would have if it were English. However, I managed to follow the signage. I managed to find a shop where I could buy a bottle of water and a sandwich; then I boarded the bus that would bring me to a village just outside of this city. I even managed to pay with the coins and banknotes required. All of that seemed strange and unfamiliar to me, like a quirky board game. It was getting dark. I could still make out some dried-out trees, as well as some unfamiliar rodents and insects that were too big for my liking. What if this land and its entire natureculture (Haraway 2003) were never meant to be a habitat for me in any way, whether hospitable or hostile?

It’s quite narcissistic and anthropocentric of me to ask this question, isn’t it? The new language and all its dialects, different across age groups and social strata, enveloped me as I calmly dozed off, and a few minutes later, I was shocked that I might have missed my exit. Full of anxiety did I showed on the map where I would need to get out. But the bus driver reassured me: they would stop there and remind me that I would need to get out. I found consolation in their caring response. I could smell the gas and sense the engine rattling as the bus bumped along the road through the countryside. As I got off the bus, I marvelled at the rough and dusty road, the strange leaves on one of the trees. There was my host and her partner. We hugged, though we had never met before. At the large table where their dog was still sleeping, we drank a warm beverage, which I believe was chai. They offered me a soup and showed me my room. It took me a while to fall asleep. The unusual smells of the house, the sheets, and the walls; the sounds of new birds, insects, and rodents; and the foreign surroundings kept me awake for quite some time. My late and tired arrival at this new place was filled with “a proliferation of feels” (Pedwell and Seigworth 2025, 5).

Affects run wild. They are ever-present when discussing the issues, experiences and dilemmas of the environmental humanities. Affect ground, shape, run through, they motivate and guardrail the relations of larger groups of people with their respective environments. Affects are by no means an isolated, solipsistic experience. They are not limited to affecting other people. Even if they might seem so, as in the travel record in the previous paragraphs. According to affect theory, Contrary to a common, everyday notion of affects, they refer to human actors as well as to devices and tools, to species of all kinds, to material and immaterial collaborators in any given situation. Affects are also not monocausal: they do not have only one anchor in this world. They do “not presuppose a passivity on one side and an activity on the other” (Massumi and Aryal 2013). Affects such as excitement and boredom, ambivalence and disgust, annoyance and hope, are what effectively relate a person to their partner, a vehicle or a pet – and vice versa: they are located between those two actors. Affects are relational and transitional: “a complex differential of forces […] between two bodies in a joint activity of becoming” (Massumi and Aryal 2013). This complexity and inherent relationality of affects is strikingly evident in all the conflicting approaches and scholarly discourses on affects. This short text is no exception. While the first paragraph presented the more experiential and embodied aspects of affect theory (cf. Hansen 2024), the following paragraphs extend the notion of affect into the realm of posthuman relations and their vectorial fields of activity and forces (cf. Deleuze and Guattari 1987, Colebrook 2004, Thrift 2008). Does this assemblage seem incongruous, relying too much on “haecceities, on sets of relations (winds, undulations of snow or sand, the song of the sand or the creaking of the ice, the tactile qualities of both)” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 382)? Within the anthropology of sound, my main field of research, this “polyvocality of directions” (ibid.) offers an unparalleled, dialectical generativity: it allows in writing to interweave and even to merge the empiricist, sensorial affects of listening with vectorial affects running through technical, auditory dispositives (cf. Schulze 2018, 2020, 2021, 2022). My writing of this text is therefore much more sonic than a reader might assume: “a sonorous much more than a visual space.” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 382) I am consistently amplifying the sonic and sensory traces when speaking and thinking about affects. The effects in this text are also sonic effects and sensory effects in particular.

Zooming out again into the bigger picture of environmental humanities, the concept of affect has played various roles within this growing field of scholarship. It allows for a better understanding of the relationality at play of social affects toward environmental issues as it expands the affective impact of ecocriticism (Weik von Mossner 2010, Rose et al. 2012, Bladow and Ladino 2018). This expansion rethinks the established anthropocentric and Eurocentric relationship between given environments and us, more or less humanoid protagonists (Badri 2024). At present, it is an undeniable reality that collective affects run through societies and generations, especially concerning the unfolding climate catastrophe and the ruination of a biosphere that has so far proven to be habitable for humanoid aliens like us (cf. Schulze 2018). Responses to ordinary meteorological phenomena, whether rain or storm, drought or snow, hurricanes or heatwaves, are less and less indifferent to, or even excited by, these sudden changes in weather systems. Extreme weather events are less and less welcome distractions from everyday life, because they are now harbingers of future devastation and cruelty: affective vessels for societies’ grief and a deep sense of loss. My children may never see a heavy snowfall again; summer heatwaves are becoming more and more life-threatening; there is less and less pleasure in being in the sun. What used to be announced as good weather is now an open threat. Resource wars and deep anxieties are mutually reinforcing and expanding. All these material transformations reshape our collective affects; they result in a very material climate angst (Albrecht 2017, Dodds 2020). As Brian Massumi wrote in 2002, it is precisely these affects that are at play when we think about and work with scientific concepts, such as our understanding of climate: “When you poach a scientific concept, it carries with it scientific affects. Thus, the transmission is two-way. The activity of the example is transmitted to the scientific concept, and the effects of science are transmitted to the example.” (Massumi 2002, 22)

The example I introduced earlier alters, needless to say, the scientific concept of affect I am writing about here. Affects do still connect you to your loved ones or your co-workers, but also to your preferred shoes or socks, your mobile device or gravel bike, your Bluetooth earbuds and, no doubt about that, to your hookup app of choice or a plethora of messaging apps. Some effects keep you involved in political activities around you, in climate phenomena, in the building where you live and the one where you regularly go to work; or the one where a bar or restaurant, a café that you frequently visited some years ago, is still situated. It might be a tree in front of an old building that you love, a garden with carrots, potatoes, tomatoes or courgettes, apples and berries that you share with someone else; it might be an author who writes about this particular environment and who you openly dislike reading. Or it might be another author whose work you almost consider yourself a fan of, a follower of: you simply love the way they write and think and the way they present themselves. Affect plays a significant role in research, often downplayed or camouflaged to maintain a persona of unaffected omniscience. By employing the concept of affect, we can also examine our relationships to this particular group of actors: we can “theorise what happens before conscious cognition” (Tuin 2022: 17).

Any environment in which we find ourselves, be it a naturecultural, societal sensescape or a constellation of artefacts and affective networks, is, in this sense, a thick one: it is not reduced to selected perceptible atoms or objects or entities. It is potentially infinite and infinitely dense. Packed with histories and biographies, affectively loaded to the max, layers of abandoned and remembered moments, reconstructed and reformed infrastructures, their oral histories, vague recollections and loads of gossip, half-knowledge and highly detailed expertise, thickly coated layers and layers and layers of truisms, assumptions, clichés, personal insights, credos, affects and sensibilities, “transitioning through the encounter to different outcomes, perhaps structured into different roles” (Massumi and Aryal 2013). It takes a different kind of sensing to capture just a tiny fraction of this in a situated experience. Experiencing this layered thickness of affects in their synchronic and diachronic complexity, in their interlocking and interweaving, is what I call in my anthropology of sound an example of thick sensing. The term blatantly honours Clifford Geertz’s bold advocacy and vivid writing of thick description. Although in reality it is more closely connected to the approach of thick listening recently discussed in sound studies and ethnomusicology: a mode of listening and reflection that operates thoroughly “immersed in substantive and historical as well as sensational, fictional and obsessive layers” (Schulze 2018: 156; cf. Glaros 2018, Krukowski 2017, Geertz 1974).

Possible lists of all the influential layers and coatings in the environment you are in right now – be it a library or a subway, an office or an apartment, a park or a shed, a waiting room, any list you can think of – will always be incomplete. This infinite thickness of any environment you find yourself in is the rich repertoire from which our shared affects emerge. This thickness is the anti-scarcity, the abundance of affects: a reservoir of never-ending generativity. Listening thickly and sensing thickly allows them to enter and to discern at least some of the threads and sheets and nods and nodes and twisted tangles within an affective environment. It requires, however, to lay these thick experiences bare, performatively, in writing or singing, in drawings or collages, in a video or a sequence of tones and interfering oscillations. So perhaps, as Lauren Berlant has conceded, “there is not a monoaffective imaginary” (Helms, Vishmidt and Berlant 2010). And that is good news. There is always a pluriaffective imaginary that is generative. It is a reason to persist, to sense, to think, to write, to live, to love, to speak, to resist, to desire – and not to stop sensing.

It is early evening as I finish this text at my desk at home. More and more of my neighbours are returning to their apartments. It is pitch-black outside on this Tuesday in early January. It is an early afternoon, towards the end of May, as I finish another revision of this text. I hear bells ringing in a piece of music coming from the loudspeakers in front of me (Jeck 2024, track 5). I am very happy about the form this short text has now taken.

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