As stated earlier, affect is a relative term, as it denotes a passage of intensity between things. Affect means things acting upon other things, nothing more, nothing less. Thus understood, affects accompany the actualisation of the world into discrete individuals.
The ontological concept of affect can also be approached from the more familiar perspective of human consciousness. Brian Massumi observes that in human experience the affective dimension appears as a “background” to everyday perceptions. We live in an actualised world that is given to us as organised, consensual reality, which can be described in qualitative terms. This habitual terrain is sometimes disturbed by inexplicable states of intensity, such as a certain emotion
131 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 57.
132 See chapter “1837: Of the Refrain” in Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, pp. 310–
350.
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overtaking us, out of nowhere. The unforeseeable nature of affect is
“marked by a gap between content and effect”.133 A certain stimulus (content) does not produce an expected reaction (effect). As affectivity concerns the pre-individual field, this unexpected quantitative dimension of intensity is the indicator of an affect, its trace or remainder within qualitative reality.134
The autonomy of affect situates the body into its environment on a fundamental level. “The body doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing but situated”.135 Thus the body is always already resonating with intensities that at the same time give rise to this perceptive body. Here we have the two elements of affect:
intensity and mediation. Every form of communication includes this intensive dimension, which appears as a “transtemporal” event, since it derives from pre-conscious and pre-actualised encounters.136
Massumi analyses the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s colour-coded terror alert system, introduced in March 2002 in response to the World Trade Center attacks. He notes that the alert system functions mainly on the affective level and is used to modulate and calibrate the public’s anxiety. The purpose is to create a mood of acceptance for the strengthening of security measures in society. Since the alert system monitors only the “threat” of an imminent terror action, it communicates nothing: threat or possibility cannot really take an identifiable form. As such, the threat is also curiously
133 Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 24, original emphasis.
134 As Deleuze states in Nietzsche and Philosophy, quality is dependent on quantity: affects, as differential pre-individual relations, form the genetic conditions for qualities; pp. 42–44. This kind of notion of affect is supported also by research done in the field of neuropsychology.
As the pioneering neuropsychologist Silvan Tomkins phrases it, affects are distinct and independent from the basic drives (respiration, hunger, thirst, sex) because affects are not bound to the feedback system of the body. Instead, affects are the “silent” neural activations of the biological body, resonating, acting upon and sometimes contradicting the qualified emotions. As an autonomous “extra-dimension”, affect is what makes feelings “feel”,
providing intensity to conscious experience. See Tomkins, “What are affects?” in Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, eds. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank (Durham:
Duke University Press, 1995), pp. 36–37.
135 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, p. 30, original emphasis. This “infolding” of contexts is what Massumi means by the affective dimension. A body is immersed in its environment via affectivity, receiving and transmitting intensities.
136 “Transtemporality” is used here to highlight the event’s two-sided relation to time, affecting both the past and the future as it enters our consciousness.
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transtemporal, since it combines both anxiety about the future as well as the trauma of the past. This is the transtemporality of intensity: fear strikes the body and activates it even before it is registered as a sensation or feeling. “The fear is a dynamic ingathering of an action assuring the continuity of its serial unfolding and moving the reality of the situation, which is its activation … The experience is in the fear, in its ingathering of action, rather than the fear being the content of an experience”.137 The object of fear appears in our consciousness only retroactively: we feel fear towards what our body just previously encountered as intensity.
As noted in the case of the terror-alert system, intensities are also highly transferable. We all know how a certain mood can spread rapidly among a crowd of people. Or rather, how a certain intensity will spread and produce more or less compatible reactions, according to each person’s acquired patterns of response. To take a most drastic example, when a bomb goes off in a public space, we share the intensity of affect but react in our own fashion to this sudden event:
we all are alarmed, prepared by the autonomic nervous system for flight or fight. Some of us will flee, some will halt in panic and some will start to help others. What is noteworthy is that this shared intensity, manifested in different ways, produces a crowd of people out of discrete individuals: as the pre-individual dimension of transferable intensity, the affective is the basis for collective individuation.
AFFECTIVE RELATIONS
As a concept, affect thus covers a broad range. In his commentary on Deleuze’s use of the term, Gregory Seigworth widens the scope of consideration beyond human consciousness and distinguishes a third aspect of the concept, making the following three-part distinction: 1) affectio, affect as “effect”, the influence of one body over another, the state of a body, transitive effect undergone by a body in a system; 2) affectus, affect as “becoming”, a continuous intensive variation in the relations between various forces; 3) affect as “pure immanence”, an autonomous multiplicity of affects, without distinction of any exteriority or interiority.138
137 Brian Massumi, “Fear (The Spectrum Said)”, Positions: East Asia Culture Critique, vol. 13, no. 1 (2005), p. 37.
138 Gregory Seigworth, “From Affection to Soul” in Gilles Deleuze – Key Concepts, ed. Charles J.
Stivale (Chesham: Acumen Publishing, 2005), pp. 166–167.
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These three aspects of the concept of affect can be seen to form a kind of methodology in Deleuze’s writings, a form of both philosophical analysis and critical praxis. First of all, affectio corresponds to a materialist analysis of social interaction, as we saw in Massumi’s account of the U.S. government terror-alert system. From such a viewpoint the social space or situation is seen in terms of forces and effects, resonance and collapses between bodies. Socio-political formations, institutions and language function as the imposition of a consensual reality upon different individuals. It is here that the Deleuzean and Foucauldian notions of Power are united:
Power is the affectio of desire, a stratification of a certain set of force relations.139
However hegemonic and totalising a certain power structure is, there is always the potential for a change in a given system. Affectus denotes this potential: the work of recognising and analysing the
“lines of flight”, or processes of becoming-other, that form their beginnings in a certain social space or situation. There are always possibilities for escaping the dominant power structures: “The first rule of the social is that it flees on all sides at once”.140 This is the principle of the rhizome and the line of flight: rather than taking the form of resistance or counter-attack, which would already accept the power structure as given, the critique of power formations should start from the evaluation and “cartography” of possible breaking points. In such a way the critique is able to leave the level of actualised power (linguistics, politics) and reach the counter-actualising machinations of affects. As Deleuze and Guattari state, the affective potential of a line of flight concerns an “[i]mperceptible rupture, not signifying break” in a given system.141
Finally, the third level of consideration is affect itself, seen as a positive force, not an effect of force but the “plane of immanence” of forces. Immanence here corresponds metaphysically with Spinoza’s single substance (Deus sive natura): immanence as immanent to itself, immanence as substance. This is why Deleuze and Guattari speak of the plane of immanence: all metaphysical distinctions or hierarchies are ultimately collapsed or flattened into an even consistency. This is the
139 Seigworth, “From Affection to Soul,” p. 166.
140 Seigworth, “From Affection to Soul,” p. 166.
141 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 24.
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ontological foundation of Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy: “pure”
immanence, not subjected to anything else, does away with real distinctions (form/matter, mind/body, concept/content) and provides the basis to approach everything as active production.
In the three-part exposition of affect, the focus moves from the affective capacity of bodies or things to the interval – a derangement or deterritorialization of states of affairs, and finally to the plane of immanence as “the absolute ground for philosophy” and un-individuated, impersonal life – a life (une vie).142 By nature indefinite, this impersonal life is present in all the moments an actualised individual goes through – abstract, yet real. A life is abstract because it retains all the potentiality of the unactualised world, not yet bound by form or subject. It is the grand total of the infinite relations of the world. Deleuze summarises:
Each individual, body and soul, possesses an infinity of parts which belong to him in a more or less complex relationship. Each individual is also himself composed of individuals of a lower order and enters into the composition of individuals of a higher order. All individuals are in Nature as though on a plane of consistence whose whole figure they form, a plane which is variable at each moment.
They affect each other in so far as the relationship which constitutes each one forms a degree of power, a capacity to be affected.
Everything is simply an encounter in the universe, a good or a bad encounter.143
The scope of Deleuze’s concept of affect develops a new form of materialism. Approaching things as encounters charges them with the potential to transform. Traditional Western thought has approached matter as a “silent”, inert, passive substance that requires the imposition of form upon it in order to exist in a concrete way.
Deleuze’s view is that matter possesses immanently the potential to form and transform itself. And because of this, matter-energy or matter-flow also retains the potential for further modulations or transformations. However, flows can come to a halt; matter
142 Seigworth, “From Affection to Soul”, p. 168. See chapter three of this work for further discussion on the concept of indefinite life.
143 Deleuze and Parnet, Dialogues, pp. 59–60.
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coagulates and stable identities are formed. This actualisation is self-evident. The actualised world is matter-memory, composed of individuals in various phases of transformation. Affect as mediation implies the structure of individuation, as an individual begins to emerge out of its environment. A cloud forms when air cools below its saturation point and millions of water droplets take the appearance of a white mass. A mass of air is becoming saturated and the cloud is an expression of this process. A thing is better known through its conditions or what it expresses than through an isolated examination of what it is. Therefore we must consider individuals in the process of their formation.