In an interview with Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg, Lawrence Grossberg speaks of the need to define the ‘specificity’ of what affect has come to encompass, since ‘basically, it's become everything that is non-representational or non-semantic – that's what we now call affect’ (Grossberg 2010: 316). Grossberg accordingly defines affect on the basis of Raymond Williams's ‘structures of feeling’, which he understands to be

As defined by Gregg and Seigworth, one of the aims of the ‘affective turn’ is to move away from the so-called linguistic turn, and it is arguably in that separation that it is constituted as the new in theory. I wish to examine the significance of that break for affect theory as a discourse and its relation to theory more broadly. While the claim that affect can bypass the semiotic is what gives affect theory its modernity as a discourse predicated upon a conscious break from structuralist and post-structuralist linguistics, I should like to interrogate its definition as a non-semiotic force postulated as the ‘livable’ exterior of meaning and the implications of that definition for a discourse that is ostensibly understood through its resistance to proper qualities.