Abstract

This work examines 'affect' as an element of everyday life. It considers in detail the way in which affect has been variously conceptualized in philosophy, in psychology, and in cultural studies. Much of the work here is based on the philosophies of Gilles Deleuze, Walter Benjamin, and Henri Bergson. Hence, there is an emphasis on a more distinctly ontological and materialist approach to culture and cultural practices. ;Most of all, this study attempts to bring a fuller understanding of affect to cultural studies in order to stretch the boundaries of what counts as life, culture, and experience. The work argues that cultural studies needs to find ways to take account of the processual concreteness of everyday life and that, in order to do so, cultural studies must dare to trespass into realms that it has never considered particularly available for description and analysis: from the incorporeal to the inorganic and all things in-between. ;This study is organized into four major chapters. In the first chapter, the various grounds traversed by affect and the problems of writing 'about' affect are established. The second chapter reads across Continental philosophy to extract and expand upon the undertheorized spatio-temporalities of affect in terms of what Bergson and Deleuze call 'the virtual.' In the third chapter, the major emphasis is on the work of Sigmund Freud and his earliest theorizations of affect. Freud's theories are re-evaluated through the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. The fourth and concluding chapter examines the writings of Henri Lefebvre on everyday life and, also, the importance that Lefebvre's work has for new directions in cultural studies. The thrust of the argument concerns an almost completely neglected third term in Lefebvre's approach to questions of everyday life: everydayness. It is, ultimately, through everydayness that affect and 'the virtual' might find their most direct and important ways onto the theoretical terrain of cultural studies.