Thinking in terms of affect presents us with an opportunity to reconceive the structuration of subjectivity as “an assemblage of body memories and preindividual affective capacities a new ontology of bodily matter, beyond the autopoiesis of the human organism” (Clough: 9). The encounter is an event through which nothing is prefigured and, in Gilbert Simondon’s terminology, the encounter is itself preindividual – a continuous field of potential functions “out of phase with formed entities” (ibid.: 27, 34). It exists in-between states of action and being acted upon (Siegworth & Gregg: 1), between movement and rest: it “moves as it feels” (Massumi: 1, 15). Because affect is intensity (Massumi: 15-16, 27). Hence it appears to us as a Something: we cannot be sure of what. It is for this reason that an affective encounter cannot be recognised, only sensed it prefigures the exercise of the faculties in a “common sense”, one common to us (ibid. “Each faculty must be borne to the extreme point of its dissolution, at which it falls prey to triple violence: the violence of that which forces it to be exercised, of that which it is forced to grasp and which it alone is able to grasp, yet also that of the ungraspable (from the point of view of its empirical exercise)” (ibid.). “But how does one encounter, or live in pursuit of affect? How may we recognise an encounter?” For Gilles Deleuze, an encounter happens as an elevation of each of the faculties to the limit of their “transcendent exercise” (Deleuze 2014: 187-188). Īffects are no longer feelings or affections they go beyond the strength of those who undergo them. In less than an hour, Wallace has been transformed irrecoverably. A world that ought not to be, in which “as one played one loved…” (ibid.). He enters a world of elongated elfin figures and placid wild panthers, children playing delightful games, and books, the pages of which “were not pictures, but realities” (ibid.: 148-150). The young Wallace opens the door, as the reader expected him to do. “Then, he said, he had a gust of emotion” (ibid.). Something about this door, in this wall, is electromagnetically charged with affect. The green door forces itself into this most mundane and hostile of moments. A moment of unprecedented emotional distress. “e recalls a number of mean, dirty shops, and particularly that of a plumber and decorator, with a dusty disorder of earthenware pipes, sheet lead ball taps, pattern books of wall paper, and tins of enamel” (ibid.). A small boy, four years old, brought up “so sane and “old-fashioned,” as people say,” finding himself alone in the streets of West Kensington, cutting a wretched figure (Wells: 146-147). Wells’s short story “The Door in the Wall” (1911), the protagonist Lionel Wallace recounts his first (and only) true affective encounter, experienced when he was too young to comprehend its enchanted strangeness, its weirdness, and the significant impact it was to have on the remainder of his life. I believe I encountered it before, but I was not ready.” However we see fit to define our lives, however it is we choose to spend our time (when that choice is indeed available to us), when we are asked a variation on the question “Why is it you do what you do?”, the unnameable answer is “to experience affect. It continues to dissolve us, it tingles, it “shimmers” (Barthes: 101). It is the digestive acid of the encounter. It produces affect.Īffect is the desired harvest of art, of literature, of thought. We know of the encounter, because it affects us. The encounter feeds on us, it eats us, disinterestedly, without ceremony sometimes immediately sometimes it merely infects us, grows slowly in the lower intestine, gradually working on us from inside. At the centre of every significant (political, cultural, personal) event lies a breakthrough, which is itself the desired object of an encounter. It’s as though, through a crack of circumscribed reality, the Outside seizes upon us, shattering everything we thought it meant to know, to feel, to be. Something throws itself together in a moment as an event and a sensation a something both animated and inhabitable. This something is not an object of recognition but of a fundamental encounter. Something in the world forces us to think. I wrote this essay a year ago for a writing competition.
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