Amit S. Rai: RE: More on the affects of organized abandonment
I wish to respond to Brian's post by reflecting on the relationship of affect to race, ontology to epistemology, multiplicity and representation.
It seems to be a slight point but the assumption in much of the present literature on affect that i am reading (Massumi on “Fear, the Spectrum Said,” Spinoza’s Ethics, Deleuze on cinema and Bergson, Foucault on biopolitics, Clough on affect, political economy and information, Ka-Fai Yau on Hong Kong cinema, Terranova on Said, Delanda on phase transitions, C. S. Peirce’s definition of feeling, Adam Smith on sympathy, Bharatmuni on rasa, and Anahid on sound)—not all at once, by the way, and the way citation has worked (and its diverse forms) has been interesting to attend to in this event—that assumption seems to be that affect precedes representation. I am most directly speaking about the various references to a clear distinction between affect and representation not only throughout this event, but, for instance, in Massumi’s brilliant essay.
He writes on the American terrorist alert system as a form of perceptual power (the self-modulating of attention), “They were signals without signification. All they distinctly offered was an “activation contour”: a variation in intensity of feeling over time.3 They addressed not subjects’ cognition, but rather bodies’ irritability. Perceptual cues were being used to activate direct bodily responsiveness rather than reproduce a form or transmit definite content. Each body’s reaction would be determined largely by its already-acquired patterns of response. The color alerts addressed bodies at the level of their dispositions toward action… The alert system was introduced to calibrate the public’s anxiety. In the aftermath of 9/11, the public’s fearfulness had tended to swing out of control in response to dramatic, but maddeningly vague, government warnings of an impending follow-up attack. The alert system was designed to modulate that fear. It could raise it a pitch, then lower it before it became too intense, or even worse, before habituation dampened response. Timing was everything. Less fear itself than fear fatigue became an issue of public concern. Affective modulation of the populace was now an official, central function of an increasingly time-sensitive government.”
But If there was no content that went along with the activation of bodily responsiveness, then how does one explain the waves of fear that were linked quite explicitly to specific communities--Arab, South Asian, Muslim, etc.? Yes but of course Massumi’s ontological point is that there is nothing that naturally, essentially or even genealogically links a given content to the activation, emergence, and modulation of affective dispositions (proprioception, mesoception, Hansen’s affectivity). This modulation has the directness of touch.
Now I think it is important to think about this direct mode of power in relationship to what Foucault called biopolitical racism (to return also to Dan’s affecting comment about whiteness and apartheid) (again how does citation work in what I write, aren’t some forms of citation themselves a kind of copyrighting?). In other words, can the perceptual mode of power be a way of producing and distributing differences between populations? In other words, if the media refunctioning of the alert spectrum in a Nicolodeon “black oriented” cable TV show, giving advice as to how to make your North American middle-class home disaster proof through a hip hop sequence ensconced between narrative segments, and aired on South Asian cable seen in Bangalore India, is a way of thinking about how the perceptual mode of power, affect, is always also an assemblage of both representation and sensation, individuation and population production. ”Ideas are problematic or ‘perplexed’ multiplicities, made up of relations between differential elements. Intensities are implicated multiplicities, implexes, made up of relations between assymetrical elements which direct the course of the actualization of Ideas…” The crucial point in Deleuze’s definition of abstract machines as a circuit between the virtual-actual is the necessary insistence that one not loose sight of the differing nature of multiplicities. As I see it, the ontogenetic argument—to think the non-phenomenal nature of actual-virtual events in terms of an always emerging and dynamic topology—aims to break the “iron collars of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy in judgment, and resemblance in perception” (Deleuze). I feel compelled by this argument to find a line flight from the same and the similar of representation, but does that mean, 1. That the perceptual mode of power is not also a mode of representation, not simply that representation is a capture of the spontaneity of affect (as Massumi argues)? And 2. That modes of representation cannot also be levers of/in an ontogenesis, orgiastic, or chaotic representation that proceeds through contagion and shock.
Massumi writes, “The self-defensive reflex-response to perceptual cues that the system was designed to train into the population wirelessly jacked central government functioning directly into each individual’s nervous system.”
The definition of population is at stake here. First, if the pop is already heterogeneous, that is heterogeneously targeted, then the intensity, effectivity, and thresholds directly connecting government to any given nervous system would already be a question of modulating for these differences. This explains at least partly why certain communities were far more jumpy than others when these alerts came down. So it wasn't a central nervousness that this heterogeneous population shared, it was a differential targeting.
Now this gets back to what I think is the most important point in Nigel’s original post, and that was how a praxis of affectivity must begin with a consideration of this multiplicity, this constant and regulated movement between perception and representation. An intensive politics would have to situate the death of the diagrammer within the diagram, a becoming imperceptible that marked one’s own vanishing point as a frame of reference. That would be a first conditionality. A second would be a rigorous refusal of a non-pragmatic binarization between ontology and epistemology. In that sense, if we are to break once and for all the seemingly natural bonding between being and truth (which would also oblige us to situate the truth claims that have structured the event of under fire) the ontogenetic argument must yield to a thought of the assemblage’s multiplicity. In that sense, also, it helps us to pose better the nature of the problem embedded in the perceptual mode of power.
This would return us to Retorts incisive salvos. What is resistance in the perceptual mode of power? Is it about rehabituating? Or refusing habituation as such? These questions are embedded in the praxis that produced “Disappeared in America,” which was the name of a fantastic series of events put together through the implexing of detainees pre and post 9-11, immigration rights workers, artists and theorists and media activists (such as naeem and sarah): “Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen work on projects that look at hyphenated identities and security panic. The majority of detainees in recent paranoia times are from the invisible underclass - shadow citizens who drive taxis, deliver food, clean tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we "see" them is when we glance at the license in the taxi partition, or the vendor ID card. When detained, they cease to exist in the consciousness. The impulse to create an insider-outsider dynamic with "loyalty" overtones has a long pedigree: WWI incarceration of German-Americans; 1919 detention of immigrants in Anarchist bomb scare; WWII internment of Japanese-Americans; execution of the Rosenbergs; HUAC "red scare"; infiltration of Deacons For Defense and Black Panthers; and the rise of the Minutemen.” http://www.disappearedinamerica.org/
> Dr. Amit S. Rai
It seems to be a slight point but the assumption in much of the present literature on affect that i am reading (Massumi on “Fear, the Spectrum Said,” Spinoza’s Ethics, Deleuze on cinema and Bergson, Foucault on biopolitics, Clough on affect, political economy and information, Ka-Fai Yau on Hong Kong cinema, Terranova on Said, Delanda on phase transitions, C. S. Peirce’s definition of feeling, Adam Smith on sympathy, Bharatmuni on rasa, and Anahid on sound)—not all at once, by the way, and the way citation has worked (and its diverse forms) has been interesting to attend to in this event—that assumption seems to be that affect precedes representation. I am most directly speaking about the various references to a clear distinction between affect and representation not only throughout this event, but, for instance, in Massumi’s brilliant essay.
He writes on the American terrorist alert system as a form of perceptual power (the self-modulating of attention), “They were signals without signification. All they distinctly offered was an “activation contour”: a variation in intensity of feeling over time.3 They addressed not subjects’ cognition, but rather bodies’ irritability. Perceptual cues were being used to activate direct bodily responsiveness rather than reproduce a form or transmit definite content. Each body’s reaction would be determined largely by its already-acquired patterns of response. The color alerts addressed bodies at the level of their dispositions toward action… The alert system was introduced to calibrate the public’s anxiety. In the aftermath of 9/11, the public’s fearfulness had tended to swing out of control in response to dramatic, but maddeningly vague, government warnings of an impending follow-up attack. The alert system was designed to modulate that fear. It could raise it a pitch, then lower it before it became too intense, or even worse, before habituation dampened response. Timing was everything. Less fear itself than fear fatigue became an issue of public concern. Affective modulation of the populace was now an official, central function of an increasingly time-sensitive government.”
But If there was no content that went along with the activation of bodily responsiveness, then how does one explain the waves of fear that were linked quite explicitly to specific communities--Arab, South Asian, Muslim, etc.? Yes but of course Massumi’s ontological point is that there is nothing that naturally, essentially or even genealogically links a given content to the activation, emergence, and modulation of affective dispositions (proprioception, mesoception, Hansen’s affectivity). This modulation has the directness of touch.
Now I think it is important to think about this direct mode of power in relationship to what Foucault called biopolitical racism (to return also to Dan’s affecting comment about whiteness and apartheid) (again how does citation work in what I write, aren’t some forms of citation themselves a kind of copyrighting?). In other words, can the perceptual mode of power be a way of producing and distributing differences between populations? In other words, if the media refunctioning of the alert spectrum in a Nicolodeon “black oriented” cable TV show, giving advice as to how to make your North American middle-class home disaster proof through a hip hop sequence ensconced between narrative segments, and aired on South Asian cable seen in Bangalore India, is a way of thinking about how the perceptual mode of power, affect, is always also an assemblage of both representation and sensation, individuation and population production. ”Ideas are problematic or ‘perplexed’ multiplicities, made up of relations between differential elements. Intensities are implicated multiplicities, implexes, made up of relations between assymetrical elements which direct the course of the actualization of Ideas…” The crucial point in Deleuze’s definition of abstract machines as a circuit between the virtual-actual is the necessary insistence that one not loose sight of the differing nature of multiplicities. As I see it, the ontogenetic argument—to think the non-phenomenal nature of actual-virtual events in terms of an always emerging and dynamic topology—aims to break the “iron collars of representation: identity in the concept, opposition in the predicate, analogy in judgment, and resemblance in perception” (Deleuze). I feel compelled by this argument to find a line flight from the same and the similar of representation, but does that mean, 1. That the perceptual mode of power is not also a mode of representation, not simply that representation is a capture of the spontaneity of affect (as Massumi argues)? And 2. That modes of representation cannot also be levers of/in an ontogenesis, orgiastic, or chaotic representation that proceeds through contagion and shock.
Massumi writes, “The self-defensive reflex-response to perceptual cues that the system was designed to train into the population wirelessly jacked central government functioning directly into each individual’s nervous system.”
The definition of population is at stake here. First, if the pop is already heterogeneous, that is heterogeneously targeted, then the intensity, effectivity, and thresholds directly connecting government to any given nervous system would already be a question of modulating for these differences. This explains at least partly why certain communities were far more jumpy than others when these alerts came down. So it wasn't a central nervousness that this heterogeneous population shared, it was a differential targeting.
Now this gets back to what I think is the most important point in Nigel’s original post, and that was how a praxis of affectivity must begin with a consideration of this multiplicity, this constant and regulated movement between perception and representation. An intensive politics would have to situate the death of the diagrammer within the diagram, a becoming imperceptible that marked one’s own vanishing point as a frame of reference. That would be a first conditionality. A second would be a rigorous refusal of a non-pragmatic binarization between ontology and epistemology. In that sense, if we are to break once and for all the seemingly natural bonding between being and truth (which would also oblige us to situate the truth claims that have structured the event of under fire) the ontogenetic argument must yield to a thought of the assemblage’s multiplicity. In that sense, also, it helps us to pose better the nature of the problem embedded in the perceptual mode of power.
This would return us to Retorts incisive salvos. What is resistance in the perceptual mode of power? Is it about rehabituating? Or refusing habituation as such? These questions are embedded in the praxis that produced “Disappeared in America,” which was the name of a fantastic series of events put together through the implexing of detainees pre and post 9-11, immigration rights workers, artists and theorists and media activists (such as naeem and sarah): “Visible Collective/Naeem Mohaiemen work on projects that look at hyphenated identities and security panic. The majority of detainees in recent paranoia times are from the invisible underclass - shadow citizens who drive taxis, deliver food, clean tables, and sell fruit, coffee, and newspapers. The only time we "see" them is when we glance at the license in the taxi partition, or the vendor ID card. When detained, they cease to exist in the consciousness. The impulse to create an insider-outsider dynamic with "loyalty" overtones has a long pedigree: WWI incarceration of German-Americans; 1919 detention of immigrants in Anarchist bomb scare; WWII internment of Japanese-Americans; execution of the Rosenbergs; HUAC "red scare"; infiltration of Deacons For Defense and Black Panthers; and the rise of the Minutemen.” http://www.disappearedinamerica.org/
> Dr. Amit S. Rai