John Protevi on Ontology, Biology and Affect

From The Speculative Turn (p.393-405):

Ontology, Biology, and History of Affect

By John Protevi

For Deleuze and Guattari (hereafter ‘DG’) ‘affect’ comprises the active capacities of a body to act and the passive capacities of a body to be affected or to be acted upon. In other words, affect is what a body can do and what it can undergo. The use of this term derives from Deleuze’s reading of Spinoza, in which Deleuze carefully distinguishes ‘affect’, (affectus) as the experience of an increase or decrease in the body’s power to act, from ‘affection’ (affectio) as the composition or mixture of bodies, or more precisely the change produced in the affected body by the action of the affecting body in an encounter. Affectus or what we could call ‘experiential affect’ is not representational, Deleuze remarks, ‘since it is experienced in a living duration that involves the difference between two states’. As such, an experience of difference, affectus is ‘purely transitive’. In the main discussion of affect in A Thousand Plateaus, DG do not maintain the Spinozist term ‘affection’, but they do distinguish the relations of the extensive parts of a body (including the ‘modification’ of those relations resulting from an encounter), which they call ‘longitude’, from the intensities or bodily states that augment or diminish the body’s ‘power to act [puissance d’agir]’, which they call ‘latitude’. In other words, the ‘latitude’ of a body comprises the affects, or the capacities to act and to be acted upon, of which a body is capable at any one time in an assemblage. What are these ‘acts’ of which a body is capable? Using one of the key terms of ATP, DG define affects as ‘becomings’ or capacities to produce emergent effects in entering assemblages. These emergent effects will either mesh productively with the affects of the body, or clash with them. Meshing emergent effects will augment the power of that body to form other connections within or across assemblages, resulting in joyous affects, while clashing emergent effects will diminish the power of the body to act producing sad affects.

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