“After Affect”

Abstract

From the late 1980s to the late 2010s, a discourse of affect was advanced by various architectural theorists who aimed to account for the relationship between human beings and their environment and how things in the world appear to them as phenomena, in ways that were more scientifically advanced and politically progressive than similar accounts that had previously been offered by post-structuralism and phenomenology. A particular group of theorists informed by psychology and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze—including Sylvia Lavin and Jeff Kipnis—argued that it was crucial to focus on the experience of buildings, the sensual effects of their surfaces, the moods that they created, and the seductive power of such things as color, light, and atmosphere, without addressing meaning, language, and culture and without essentializing the body and its relationship to the environment. Furthermore, following the lead of affect theorist Brian Massumi, these architectural theorists often linked these arguments to what they claimed would be a more progressive political position. This paper historicizes the discourse of affect in architecture, analyzes the claims made by affect theorists both in architecture and in general and offers a critical evaluation of its various theoretical and political claims, by drawing upon the mounting evidence about the problematic nature of the original psychological and neuroscientific studies that inspired affect theory in the first place, and upon the mounting critical literature on affect theory that has begun to emerge in recent years.