Task 5: Affect or Aesthetics

"An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential. Of the three central terms in this essay – feeling, emotion, and affect – affect is the most abstract because affect cannot be fully realised in language, and because affect is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness (Massumi, Parables). Affect is the body’s way of preparing itself for action in a given circumstance by adding a quantitative dimension of intensity to the quality of an experience. The body has a grammar of its own that cannot be fully captured in language because it “doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts…” (Massumi, Parables 30). Before this gets too abstract, let’s return to the example of the infant."

APA Reference
Shouse, E. (Dec. 2005) "Feeling, Emotion, Affect," M/C Journal, 8(6). Retrieved 29 Dec. 2015 from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0512/03-shouse.php>.

Summary
Affect is a term that can not be explained fully through language and is mistaken as either a feeling or an emotion, but is actually neither. Instead affect always comes before or prior to the body's conscious response when experiencing something. 

Paraphrasing
Affect is a term used to describe the response the body has when experiencing something, although it is neither a feeling or an emotion. Massumi (n.d.) states that "An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a moment of unformed and unstructured potential."

Coined by the German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten (1714— 62), the term 'aesthetic' derives from the Greek word aesthesis ('perception by the senses', 'feeling' or 'sensitivity'). As a distinctive subfield of philosophy, aesthetics seeks to determine how humans respond to beauty (in both art and nature) and whether the perception of beauty, or taste, is a universal or rather a subjective faculty. Aesthetics examines the processes through which objects and phenomena are experienced by the senses, and is concerned with pure feelings of pleasure or displeasure elicited by sense experience rather than with the practical functions of things or with factual information about them.

APA Reference
Cavallaro, D. (2001). Critical and Cultural Theory (1st ed.). Bloomsbury Publishing.

Summary
Aesthetics is a term given to how humans respond, either with pleasure or displeasure, to beauty in both art and nature. It determines whether the perception of beauty is a universal or subjective faculty. 

Paraphrasing
German philosopher Alexander Baumgarten explained that the term aesthetic derived from the Greek word aesthesis, which is the perception of senses, feeling, or sensitivity. (n.d.). Aesthetics looks at how humans respond to and experience concepts of beauty; thus determining 'whether the perception of beauty... is a universal or rather a subjective faculty' (Calvallaro, 2001).