Affect and the archive, archives and their affects: an introduction to the special issue

Affect and the Archive, Archives and their Affects: An Introduction to the Special Issue In recent decades, affect (both as a verb and as a noun) has become a major focus of fields as diverse as psychology and psychoanalysis, neuroscience and critical theory. There is no singular cross-cutting definition of affect. It may, for example, be approached clinically, phenomenologically, or critically. One goal of this special issue, therefore, has been to draw together and elucidate some of these different disciplinary understandings and point to their potential for research and practice in the archival field. Arguing that emotions are innate at all evolutionary levels and in all animals, including humans, psychologist Robert Plutchik's influential classification approach identified eight primary emotions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, anticipation, trust and joy. He represented these emotions, their intensity, the relationships between them, and the ways in which they can co-occur to form derivative emotions on his ‘Wheel of Emotions’ (1980; 2001). His approach has generated a rich continuing research engagement around the affective and the human psyche. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s work on Silvan Tompkins’ psychobiology of differential affects drew from critical and cultural theory as well as from the sciences. Her research is often identified as seminal in precipitating interest in affect on the part of cultural theorists. These scientific and cultural theory approaches do come together in works such as Sedgwick’s; however, the genealogy of the study of affect in the humanities and social sciences is distinct from that in the more clinical and scientific fields. Since the 1990s, in what has been dubbed ‘the affective turn,’ cultural theorists of affect have presented alternatives to the psychoanalytic approach to affect. They assert that affects, emotions and feelings are legitimate and powerful objects of critical scholarly inquiry and exist in fraught relation to each other. By contrast, in other disciplinary and professional spaces the terms ‘affect,’ ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ may be used with much less discursive tension or definitional precision, and even interchangeably. Notwithstanding such differences and divergences, many of these fields are increasingly engaging not only with the record or the Archive as theoretical constructs, but also with actual records and archives. Another goal for this special issue, therefore, has been to begin to probe what the archival field might offer that would cross-inform understandings of and debates about the nature, role and effects of affect in such diverse fields as psychology, neuroscience and critical theory. The archival field historically has had a central preoccupation with the actual and the tangible. Many practitioners and theorists continue to evince a profound distrust of stances that seem less than objective and of aspects relating to records and archives that invoke affective responses. And yet, in recent years a growing number of authors in the archival literature have been focusing on some of the emotions represented on Plutchik’s Wheel (e.g., sadness, trust) and/or engaging with treatments of affect emanating out of such fields as cultural studies, gender studies, Indigenous studies, postcolonial studies, anthropology, psychology and trauma studies (e.g., Adami 2009; DiVeglia 2010; Caswell in press; Caswell and Cifor in press; Caswell, Cifor and Ramirez in press; Cifor in press; Caswell and Gilliland 2015; Carbone 2015; Faulkhead 2008; Gilliland 2014 and 2015; Halilovich 2013 and 2014; Harris 2014;