Affect is ill-defined. As a term employed in cognitive science, affective neuroscience, and performance studies it can variously mean an autonomic reaction, the interpretation of an autonomic reaction through cognition (defined as an emotion or feeling by many scholars), a sociocultural fold in which culture is experienced and performed, or even simply the ability of bodies to both be affected or to affect other bodies. All of these definitions share an interest in how our bodies impact our actions and thoughts; how the arousal of the body through interactions with environment, cognition, and other bodies “does.” Affect theory works on the performative potential of embodied experiences to grasp this murky process of doing. I propose an intersection between the falsifiable research of affect/emotion science and the performative theory of Jill Dolan’s Utopia in Performance to establish the benefits and possibilities of cognitive and affective science’s ability to explain affect and its impact in performance and theatre.
Outlining the dual history of the affective turn I argue for the use of affect/emotion science to understand theatre’s performative potential as a clearer and specific alternative to the more far-reaching affective theories based in Spinoza and following Deleuze and Guttari. Utilizing examples from plays like Sarah Kane’s Blasted and the Tectonic Theatre Project’s The Laramie Project in conversation with work on basic emotions I put forward a theory of performative affect focused on the two axes suggested by the James A Russell’s circumplex model of affect: valence (pleasure to displeasure) and arousal (arousal to sleep). This model allows for the complexities of affect/emotion to be understood as an interaction between cognition, physiological response, and the larger environment (social, cultural, and material circumstances), ultimately offering a way to understand the potential impact of affectively salient theatrical and performance experience.
