OTHER TO THE WORLD OF THINGS + FORMS
Affect speaks of another reality to that which is named and known. Other to the world of things and forms and functions, it is the inchoate realm of flows and forces — of gradients and intensities, of transitions and relations — which the body senses all too well, yet comprehension struggles to make sense of. Systems of capture — from language to capital — create the illusory conditions in which this truth of reality as it is becomes veiled, replaced by constructed representations from which there seems no escape or alternative. We are assured that life’s like that, that’s how it is. Moreover, we are ourselves complicit in maintaining these illusions. Indeed, regimes of power are the easier targets, for the fiction that keeps us most alienated is arguably the investment in our own sense of self. A critical turn towards affect might then involve the critique of signifying structures or the wrestling of our affections back from capital so as to act rather than simply be acted upon. But there can be no change until we acknowledge that selfhood is itself something of a construct. To conceive life in affective terms is to apprehend the body not as a fixed entity but as a network of interconnected flows. A body’s capacity is not determined by the power that it can seize or store, but through the quality of its encounters and interactions. So if affect has an emancipatory potential, it comes at some cost. The loss of bearings — of certainty, stability, even one’s anchorage to self — can produce the vertiginous free-fall of both flight and panic. For affect is the reality which cognition works so hard keep in check, the seething field of forces that conscious mind strives endlessly to render still or stable.
From Emma Cocker, The Yes of the No, (Sheffield: Site Gallery, 2016), p. 80. Revised extract of a text that was previously published as ‘Reading Towards Becoming Causal’ in Reading/Feeling, (If I Can’t Dance… Amsterdam, 2013).