An affective process is any psychological or social process driven by affect — the pre-cognitive bodily intensities (tension, ease, agitation, attraction) that shape experience before they are interpreted as named emotions. Affect theory distinguishes affect from emotion: emotion is socially coded and linguistically structured; affect is the raw capacity to be affected and to affect.
In social theory, affective processes explain how people are moved to act, believe, or identify in ways that cannot be accounted for by rational deliberation or ideological persuasion alone. A political rally, a classroom, or a family dinner operates through affective processes — the transmission of intensity between bodies — that produce alignment, resistance, or discomfort independent of the propositional content being exchanged.
The study of affective processes draws on Baruch Spinoza’s account of affects as increases or decreases in a body’s power to act, reworked through Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Brian Massumi, and Sara Ahmed. The political stakes are significant: if social order is maintained not just through belief and coercion but through the organization of affect, then political transformation requires attending to how bodies are moved, not only to what people think.