The Dynamics of Affective Objects

First: all objects are affective. To be an object is to be capable of affecting - of making a difference in the world.[1] Objects are coalesced assemblages of differential capacity. It is by virtue of their actual existence that objects affect things and are vulnerable to the affective forces which exceed them. This much should be obvious.

Why bring it up then? Well, because even if we agree that objects are compositions with affective force what remains to be understood in detail is exactly how such entities come to operate in a world that is perpetually in motion. That is, what is perhaps the most interesting but least understood characteristic of objects is their affect dynamics.

In a recent post (here) Levi Bryant lays out quite nicely some definitions of the notion of ‘affect’, and discusses how such a concept might be used to understand the nature of objects and their relations.

Here are a two key statements from Levi’s post:

• “…all objects are defined by their affects or capacities to act or be acted upon.”[2] 

• “Affects refer to the powers or capacities of an object, and define the relational dimension of substances or how they interface or port with other objects in the world.”[3]

I couldn’t agree with Levi more. Objects, or what I prefer to call assemblages, must be defined by their capacities to affect and be affected in the world. And the manner in which an object’s capacities or powers are unleashed is determined by both its constituent properties and the capacities of other entities and systems in which it is in constant relation. To put it another way, an object’s defining powers emerge from both the capacities inherent to its assembled properties – its unique and partially withdrawn material and expressive qualities - as well as the affordances given up to it in its interactions with the capacities and properties of other objects and environments. This co-manifestation of capacities or potencies is a co-local catalytic event brought forth via the affect dynamics of the actual onto-specific assemblages involved (as opposed to general patters or virtual potentials).

And, to be sure, every assembled object is in perpetual relation with a myriad of objects and processes at various scales. In fact, the achievement of a temporal object’s individuality (‘individuation’) is only ever possible through the intensive territorializing and assembling forces at work at the outer edges of various chaotic energectic-material flows. This relational ‘coming into being’ and maintenance of object assemblages is co-extensive with the functional and operational onto-specific efficacies (powers, capacities, potencies) inherent within the actual properties and intensities of individual compositions, assemblages and objects.

In addition, I agree with Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (as Levi quotes them) when they wrote:

Affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon. Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more stained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of forces or intensities. That is, affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body (human, nonhuman, part-body, and otherwise), in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and worlds, and in the very passage or variations between these intensities and resonances. (The Affect Theory Reader)

Affect dynamics among and between objects involve impingements, extrusions, transmissions (e.g., bosons), intrusions and direct but partial contact between objects in ways that augment, extend or limit the capacities of particular objects and assemblages as they exist in relation. This is why all events and situations are never simply local manifestations, but rather co-local manifestations distributed across time and space, evoking, aligning, or sometime parasitically drawing upon the capacities and agencies of various extensive and intensive actually existing properties. And it is the historical/cosmological particularities of this “in-between-ness” of things that has given us the associations and realities we now exist within.

Without going too much into it here, it is this fundamental compositional, association and (extended?) differential character of assemblages and objects which affords novel alliances between properties and powers, and therefore the emergence of new forces, affects and capacities. The open-ended, never complete, partially withdrawn nature of “in-between-ness” is an anarchic, pure difference at core of Being which allows for the possibility of new arrangements, or what Levi calls “regimes of attraction”.  

"Everything which happens and everything which appears is correlated with orders of differences: differences of level, temperature, pressure, tension, potential, difference of intensity".[Deleuze 1994:222]

However, it must be noted that specificity is the twin nature of cosmic differentiality. It is the specific constitution of particular objects which allow for particular changes in relations of force and affect – because capacities to affect and be affected are, again, embodied powers inherent in the properties of the entities and assemblages involved. For example a military-industrial-complex has an onto-specific capacity to affect based on the various properties it holds, evokes, extends, extracts, etc..[4] Whereas a basketball team, or an ant colony, or a dvd player have a very different capacity to affect based on their particular onto-specific constitution, in addition to the contexts in which they exist.

Why “onto-specificity”? Because, I argue, it is the cosmological-contextual unfolding of specific energetic-material properties of entities that make them fundamentally unique and irreducibly emergent. By referring to the ‘onto-specific’ properties of assembled objects I’m signaling that ontologically there is nothing more to know about a particular entity outside its specific compositional ontic characteristics. Everything we need to know about particular things is embodied in their specific properties and relations within the world. Ontological claims are therefore derivative of ontic encounters.

Getting back to the topic at hand, I enjoyed how Levi goes on to discuss the important distinction between active and passive affects, and then hints at some very interesting lines of thought he develops in his highly anticipated book, The Democracy of Objects:

Affects are always structured around channels (in The Democracy of Objects I theorize channels as “distinctions”) which delimit fields of possible action and receptivity. These are what Jakob von Uexkull seeks to theorize in his writings on ethology. Electric eels are able to sense their world in terms of the electric signatures that I am not, yet they have very little in the way of vision. So too in the case of sharks. Bees might sense electro-magnetic fields. Bodies of a specific type are only capable of particular types of actions.[5]

I like how he puts this: “[b]odies of a specific type are only capable of particular types of actions.” I would mutate this somewhat by saying that objects (including bodies) are both capable of and vulnerable to particular types of affects as a result of the particular relationships between actually existing onto-specific properties. I’m not sure if Levi would agree to this revision, but in effect I think we are saying very similar things: capacity is about specificity.

It must be said that for me the specific capacities to affect and be affected are what I think of as an entity’s potency. The term ‘potency’ here evokes connotations from the visceral plane (such as emanation, flavor, effervescence) that a more cerebral or abstract word like ‘capacity’ doesn’t seem to carry. Thus, an object’s particular potencies can be said to affect or be affected in variety of ways – depending on the materialities, expressions, properties and affect dynamics at play in particular circumstances.

What is more important, however, is for us to begin to understand better how the potencies or force of things – or, what some might call their ‘agencies’ – are often accumulations or compounds. Even human agents are compositions of the properties and capacities of so many sub-assemblages and seemingly ‘external’ forces and affordances. From the molecules in our bodies, to the cellular assemblages of our organs, to the symbolic resources of our social groups, and technological extensions of our memories by smartphones, we are composite beings making our way among matrices of affects and dynamic forces, accumulating and augmenting our unique potencies in relation and always in context. Thus ‘agency’ is a social and individual affair. That is to say, ‘mind’, agency, etc., is an utterly co-local event.

Fundamentally, this is why I prefer the term ‘assemblage’ to the term ‘object’. The term object signifies, at least to me, a unity that is temporary, tentative and precarious at best, whereas the notion of assemblage calls attention to the compositional, multidimensional, associational, entangled and co-implicated nature of things. Objects as assemblages are always relational as well as being uniquely efficacious: they depend and attend at the same time. And I suggest it is this dynamical nature of objects that we ought to appreciate most if we are to learn to affect more positive and practical change in a multi-agentic and complex world.