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Affect is a curious concept to come to grips with; for me it took years to become an important idea for me, and years more for it to become absolutely central.
My first exposure to affect was in Spinoza, and particularly in Deleuze’s reading of him. The easiest way to get sort of a rough idea of his affect is to imagine a field of relations and complexity, motion and activity. Think of the atmosphere: air moving about, areas of high and low pressure, local vacuums which become basins which provoke flows into themselves. The boundary of such a basin is only temporary, and when a flow moves to fill it, the the force of this flow becomes a new structure, a new boundary, always temporary, which other flows or intensities can come up against, interact with, be constrained by, channel, subsume or combine with. What drives the activity of this field? It is driven by itself, by the motion it already has (which is its form) which modifies and produces further motion (altering its form, and its mode of self-alteration). It is driven, always, by relative intensities, pressures, densities in itself. So affect, then, is a sort of pressure, intensity, tension, attention, urgency, complexity, density, substance, desire, will, which both is the field and moves the field. Through the movement of the field, it has form, if only in passing, and through this form, it also has the capacity to affect itself, and trans-form itself.
The affective field permeates everything. We are embedded in it, continuous with it, exposed to it. Our bodies, submerged in it, represent a sort of semipermeable membrane, a threshold across which affects pass. As a membrane, our bodies support and protect processes and interactions, preserving possibilities of highly sensitive internal affectation, which gives rise to animal and eventually human subjectivity, which becomes a distinctively self-affecting and self-productive subjectivity. But while the body protects and sustains these processes as long as it lives, it cannot isolate them from the world. It is constantly tugged on, wrapped up in processes beyond itself, and these processes are swept up in further processes such that the cosmos in its totality, both in its extensive breadth and its intensive and indefinitely complex depth, bears on fully on itself. This is to say, the whole, in the entirety of its relations, bears on and affects each relation, each part. Reciprocally, each relation, affected by the whole of relations, bears in turn on all other relations, and so on the whole, and so back onto itself. Each action is self-affecting: this is perhaps how we can think of karma - that all action already implicates and affects itself.
But this relationship of the parts to themselves and to each other, and thereby the parts to the whole, and thereby the whole to itself, and back to the parts, this interpenetration of affects on each other at all scales implies a single substance, Spinoza’s God, which as a whole, leaves its distinctive trace on every interaction. This trace is Spinoza’s ‘idea of God’: an infinitely complex and interpenetrative self-affecting idea, which cannot be self-identical in any proper way because of the infinity of its own self-interaction. This idea is not something we immediately grasp - indeed it is not an idea that can be 'grasped’ at all as this would imply adequate representation which would imply self-identity (which is the possibility of representation, a representation adequate to its object). Instead this is an idea to which we are exposed, to which we can only gesture: nonetheless, our exposure to this idea is entirely adequate, though ungraspable and inexpressible.
We do not recognize this idea for what it is in the first instance, where our bodies directly connect with the world beyond us, as things pass across the threshold of boundary by which we come to define ourselves. At first we are caught in immediacy of interactions and objects, we do not experience the trace of the whole on each relation or conceive of the trace each relation leaves on the whole. Affects are merely local, and so we are caught in the sway of them.
But the feeling of the whole bears on all things, though differently in each case. The sameness of the whole which is perpetually self-different, appears in its 'identity’ distinctively in all relations, in all networks of relations. Each affect is a variation on the whole. Affects are not occasioned or produced, they are only ever modified, altered. All affects are responses to or effects of affect.
Spinoza says that all power is power to be affected. The greatest power then would be to be affected by the greatest affect, the affect of the whole. But this is the trick: it is impossible for any affectation NOT to bear the trace of the whole. It is always a matter of degree, which means a matter of sensitivity. The trace of the whole is always blunted, it is only received in the extent to which a body is sensitive to it: as blunted, it remains an ambiguity, a complexity, a tension, an attention, a question, a will know, to expand, to become more sensitive, to see deeper, to feel the world more fully.
There is no teleology in Spinoza. This means we don’t get anything free. Our becoming sensitive is by no means inevitable. The discovery of the possibility of becoming sensitive, of our capacity to increase our capacity to be affected, and to experience this as joy, is perhaps only a chance occurrence. But there remains always the possibility, a possibility of deciding a teleology for ourselves, of taking command of a potentiality that the world affords us. The decision is ours. Spinoza famously notes that we do not yet know what the body can do. How sensitive has is it already? How sensitive can it become?
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