Since yesterday, I’ve racked my brain hard in order to try writing something meaningful about how our hands have knowledge. Every time I’ve ended up with what sounds like absolute nonsense (but for anyone who may be interested, here is link of a short video I made and attempted repeatedly to analyse). However, affect is too intriguing a concept for me to admit defeat to and so I continue to stick with it.
My failed attempts at writing about what affect is, got me wondering as to how one can talk about something that goes beyond representation. Some ways that immediately come to mind are non-verbal embodied signals like body language, costumes, intonation. But how can these non-verbal signals be expressed and therefore affect be relayed across time and space, especially in our contemporary moment where increasingly we don’t share a common physical space with our friends and other loved ones? One answer to the question is something I find myself indulging in a lot since I’ve moved to Chicago – GIFS.
For the sake of clarity, mostly my own, I’d first like to define what I mean by affect and a GIF. Beginning with affect, from our discussion in class, I see it as the passage of intensity between bodies that have the potential to affect and that can be affected. Moving on to defining the acronym GIF. GIF stands for “Graphics Interchange Format, an image type, that refers to an animated picture that captures physical and emotional responses” which are deployed by users communicating over the internet.
To argue for how GIFs carry affect, I would like to draw parallels with metaphors as carriers of affect. I believe that metaphors are central phenomenon in language; I hold that they may indeed be indispensable since some aspects of everyday life may only be discussed by speaking non-literally, that is metaphorically. It can be observed that the phenomenology of experience is particularly prone to being expressed metaphorically. The power of metaphors then lies in their capacity to communicate experience often by appealing to other experiences.
This claim concerning the use of metaphor in language rests on the fact that in trying to communicate an experience, deconstruction of the experience does not prove to be successful or is at best only partially successful. What I want to make salient is that the affect (which is linked to our embodiment) is crucial to experience and that the best way to understand an experience is through experience itself.
For example, suppose I am trying to describe a heartbreak to someone who has never experienced it. I explain to them my struggle, how I find myself thinking about the person, the sense of hurt, of breaking down. I have tried deconstructing the act of heartbreak, however my audience can only know heartbreak when they have experienced it for themselves in practice. It seems that no amount of talking about heartbreak can communicate to them the experience of heartbreak. That is, there is a difference between concepts and embodiment or practice. Below are two examples of metaphors that attempt to relay the experience of heartbreak
"Sure, I'd loved, I'd lost, but what followed was either relief or regret or peace or sadness. Sadness feels like you've got wet leaves in your heart. Heartbreak is like having the Spartan's roll into town and set up base camp in your soul. Inevitably, when it did happen, when I felt my heart drawn of all light and replaced by a spoddy potato in the apex of my chest, I was hopelessly, pathetically ill prepared. "
"Heartbreak is like living with a scarecrow that stands behind you for six to nine months, ensuring nobody else comes near."
Metaphors succeed to a greater extent in communicating the affect of heartbreak and they do so usually by their rhetorical appeal that is created by their bizarre literal meaning and conceptual tension inherent in them. Since experiences are affective in nature, and given the indispensability of metaphor in communicating experience, metaphors thus carry over the affect.
Similarly, the argument extends to GIFs. For example, I may communicate the experience of heartbreak through the following GIFs:
I would argue that, GIFs are more effective carriers of affect as the embodied experience that is relayed and received through GIFs is done so not solely through rhetoric but also one that appeals to our sense of sight. In conclusion, I would argue that in our time of networked media, GIFs are our new metaphors and thus our new carriers of affect.
Thanks for your post. I had never thought about GIFs in this way. I mainly thought of them as referents to ubiquitous or niche cultures that one has a laugh at. Maybe because the GIF is communicating something ambiguous enough we can implant ourselves into, or specific enough that we can know what they're talking about while others are excluded from the joke. But your use of affect and GIFs as a visual potentiality to shift affect encompasses more than just the funny GIF.