Laura Marks THE FOLD [1]
Ch 5 Introduction
TRAINING PERCEPTION AND AFFECTION
Each of our souls is a microcosm, a tiny pocket of the cosmos. We not only express the cosmos but can also learn to identify the cosmos from the point of view that we occupy. We can train ourselves to detect various kinds of unfolding. It's a bit like the detection of symptoms in psychoanalysis. The dif. ference is that the unfolding is coming from without, not within-from the cosmos, not yourself, or more precisely, from yourself as part of the cosmos.
This chapter provides a few ways to train perception, sensation, and affect in order to get a hold of the infinite and strengthen the path from your body to the cosmos, so that you may take part in struggles at all scales.
Unfolding is an aesthetic practice, because experience is embodied and temporal. Training our senses is the human end of a chain of indexical witnessing. Witnessing combines sensing with memory, and we extend these human capacities with nonhuman sensory capacities, techniques of measurement and attestation. Aligning our sensory capacities with those of nonhumans, natural and technological, we gain in an understanding of chains of causality. Plants, minerals, seas, winds, solar radiation, and other cosmic powers bear causal witness, and humans can, rather than dominate them alien de the techniques of Such human-nonhuman sensory collaborations provide the techniques of material witnessing that Susan Schuppli and the Forensic Architecture team deploy, where seeming objects, like cracked walls and poisoned leaves, bear witness in their bodies to war crimes. As Matthew Fuller and Olga Goriunova point out, sensing has a new urgency in the time necessatel catastrophe. Understanding sharpens the urgency to act, but not necessarily our capacity to act. Enormous, complex, and contradictory soul-assemblages assemble to battle climate catastrophe and the obscene economic arrangements that underlie it.
Enfolding-unfolding aesthetics can help us experience the flow of being, enlarge our understanding of the cosmos, and prepare to unfold differently.
Habitual filters block experience of the cosmos, so it can be exciting and spiritually fulfilling, but also terrifying, to experiment with lifting those fil-ters. To get ready to join healthy soul-assemblages, we can cultivate our capacity to affect and be affected. These practices too can be perilous; hence art is a fairly safe way to experiment or practice with lifting filters.
Which is healthier, to maintain the body's wholeness or to break and remake the body? The first view, which respects the monad's body's life-preserving boundary and seeks to maintain its equilibrium, arises in Spinoza, phe-nomenology, and also cultural traditions such as Buddhist philosophy and yoga praxis. For example, a number of filmmakers and film scholars relate cinematic rhythm to breath and propose that a cinema of breath can support human health. Kalpana Subramanian argues that light in cinema corresponds to breath in the body, using yoga and Vipassana philosophy, while Nathaniel Dorsky and Anand Pandian identify breath with the rhythm of editing. In both cases, and also in the breath-based cinema theory of Davina Quinlivan, the body of the film can regulate the body of the viewer.' The second view, in the minor genealogy from Nietzsche-Artaud-Deleuze/Guattari to contemporary antihumanism, contends that human life is invaded by institutions on every level and must be "cruelly" reinvented, as in Artaud's theater of cruelty.? Such a view resonates with minoritized, feminist, queer, and trans feelings that society controls us through our bodies, and with the feeling of probably every person who has endured the sensation that their body is a stranger to them, such as in adolescence or a life-threatening illness.
As I mentioned earlier, a health check such as that prescribed by Spinozan feminists is useful to test whether the organism can support such a rupture.
I support both of these understandings of the body, contradictory though they appear. As I explain in the section below, "Affective Analysis, they operate at the different scales of affect and embodiment, both of which are relevant.
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Training our bodies to be more than human, we toughen our skins to the biopolitical forces that aim to modulate the body, Biopower, Uno Kunichi writes, transforms the body into a substance that can be analyzed, measured, and normalized, all in the name of the preciousness of human life. "A philosophy of life must say on the contrary, become animal, and you will be life, the body without organs, worthy of life." By seeming to revert to states prior to the human, Uno continues, we can "open (human life) up to the life of the cosmos, to rediscover connections with all the flows of life." Elsewhere Uno characterizes the boundary-defying Butoh performances of Tatsumi Hijkata and Min Tanaka, who, plunging into childhood and into death, train their bodies to eradicate the clichés of humanness. The strange emergent rhythms invite the virtual into the body.*
I had the unsettling pleasure to witness a performance by Tanaka at a symposium Uno organized in Tokyo in 2014. Dressed in a patched old robe, his aged and lanky body pure sinew, Tanaka ran around the stage in circles like a worried dog, faster and faster, dipping ever more deeply to the floor, muttering something like "What am I going to do?" Suddenly he swept back the heavy curtain behind the stage, revealing the wintry campus outside, and disappeared. We heard his feet pounding into the distance. Time elapsed and we started to worry that he had abandoned us too-serious academic confer-enciers. Finally, Tanaka reemerged on the other side of the window. He fell to his back on the concrete among overturned café chairs, his behind facing us. As he opened his legs wide to the sky, the robe slipped away to reveal his electric-blue underwear. It was like the sun rising!
Tanaka's performance taught me that discovering a more ancient, prehu-man body within your body requires you not to abandon human culture but to remix it. Trained over years to forget and reinvent, his muscles, joints, and organs discovered new internal rhythms. With skillful showmanship Tanaka included us, the attending audience, in his discovery of what a body can do, activating in us new rhythms of shock, elation, and profoundest silliness.
Artworks Connect the Body to the Cosmos
An artwork is not (only) an allegory for the monad, it is a monad, an enclosed. soul that perceives and expresses the cosmos from its singular point of view.
An artwork is a disquiet monad, applying differential relations to unfold cer-ta microperceptions; as Simon O Sullivan explains, probably the disturb iner "remarkable" elements that are bothering it. le folds these with is own style for manner of unfolding) to create its world actualizing virtualities and
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realizing possibilities' One of O'Sullivan's examples is Gerhard Richters color-chart paintings, whose colored rectangles grow from endless recombinations of red, blue, yellow, and white. They are "immanent utopias" performing the infinity of possible colors. Selectively framing and intensifying chaos, artworks make soul-assemblages that bring new sensations into actu ality. Artworks are also great places to test fabulations, monads that model worlds incompossible with ours and invite us to inhabit them in relative safety.
Recall that affections, those singular points of actualization, have the potential to turn the individual inside out and link it to the cosmos.® The human microcosm can discover the cosmos within itself not only through older methods such as meditation and hallucinogens but also through cosmic cinemas.
What I call "talisman-images" are artworks that comodulate with the cosmos by aligning human and cosmic powers? Pisters proposes that in the past couple of decades, partly made possible by growing public understanding of neuroscience, a new cinema has joined Deleuze's movement-image and time-image: the neuro-image. In the neuro-image, bodies, brains, screens, and worlds are intimately interfolded. The neuro-image, Pisters argues, is uniquely equipped to explore the cosmos from the embodied position of the microcosm, in what she calls an "intense cosmic cinema."
Embodied Methods
The human body, with its embodied mind, is the interface to the infinite. To develop this interface, we cultivate, refine, and redesign our bodily and sensory capacities. Body and mind are partners in an esthetic team. (We can also use enfolding-unfolding aesthetics to study the aesthetic experience of a tree, or a planet, or an electron, through careful empathic research.)
When I am writing or speaking, I frequently check in with my body to make sure I am saying what I mean. Braced shoulders suggest that I'm writing out of resentment. A prickling on my upper lip indicates I'm saying something I no longer believe. I pause to investigate the source of this feeling and try to resolve it. This body check is a simple method, not infallible, but pretty good, to ensure a higher degree of truth by appealing to "my" nondiscursive knowledge. I read other writers for the feelings embodied in their language.
An aesthetics, in its simplest and most old-fashioned guise, is simply an account of how we engage with the perceptible world. This is a phenomenological aesthetics, not a system for judging what is beautiful. Thus, what I Propose falls in the minor tradition linking the pre-Kantian, pro-Leibnizzan aesthetics of Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762) with Peirce's analysis of
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sensation, Maurice Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception, and contemporary embodied aesthetics- as well as, I must note, a tension with phenomenology in the antihumanist tradition of Nietzsche, Artaud, and Deleuze. Baumgarten defines aesthetics as a scientia cognitionis sensitivae.
"science of sensuous cognition": a sensory connection rather than a transcendental judgment. In his aesthetics, sensory knowledge, including the subtlest of microperceptions, has a synthetic immediacy that cognitive knowledge lacks. Enfolding-unfolding aesthetics, in Baumgarten's spirit, honors sensory knowledge and postpones cognition and theorization.
While Spinoza was most concerned with the health and power of the body, Deleuze and Guattari, writing for our time when capitalism penetrates the most fundamental levels of embodied being, recognized that health required first breaking down and opening up the body and the self: schizo health." Affect touches our bodies and, if we take it seriously, turns our selves inside out. As we've seen, affect is what allows us to enter a soul-assemblage.
Installed in the humanities for a generation, affect theory has come to constitute a complex discourse with application across many fields, much internal debate, some degree of calcification, and, interestingly for my pur-poses, a recent formalist turn. Sophisticated analyses of the concept remain crucial.* As I do in this book, many scholars have worked on how affect might avail tools in the struggle against information capitalism's colonization of the body.
Rather than hypostatize affect, my method of affective analysis puts it into a structured, triadic flow. It suggests ways to hone our bodies' affective capacities as analytical tools alongside, not instead of, perception and thought. We need to begin analysis with the thing that makes us most vul-nerable: feeling. Yet it's important to stay sharp while feeling, for as we've seen, affects are singularities: points that may be grasped in order to draw out an enfolded field. An affective response may be your cue to seize the moment and unfold differently. Affective analysis, therefore, is one of the central methods to construct that line from your body to the cosmos.
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Affective Analysis
A Method
Over the years I have developed a simple method for analyzing movies, art-works, and other phenomena by working through affective, perceptual, and conceptual responses. Affective analysis is an aesthetic analysis that begins by analyzing affective and embodied responses. It begins by acknowledging that starting with concepts can be reactive. Conceptual analysis tends to respond to representation. In the academy we're under pressure to sound smart, but if we adopt the wrong concepts in haste we miss an opportunity to really think. Formal analysis of the perceptible qualities of a work comes closer to the experience but can also be reactive. Perception is, of course, shaped by history and culture. It does not give complete access to the world; in fact, as Bergson pointed out, perception protects us from the world by focusing on survival. As I show in "The Information Fold," technologies that inform how it is possible to perceive make perception even more reactive.
Affective analysis draws both thought and perception back to the body, forcing us to generate new thoughts, or to face the fact that we do not yet have thoughts. It works as a reality check to slow intellectual responses and to guarantee that, when we arrive at them, they will be well grounded and relatively free of ideology. It may generate what Spinoza terms adequate ideas, or ideas that align the powers of the body with the capacities of the mind in a given situation. This Spinozist turn in the theory of affect draws on the thought of Deleuzian feminists Rosi Braidotti, Elizabeth Grosz, Patricia Pisters, and Mai Al-Nakib, who seek to identify practices that can increase joyful affects and develop adequate ideas. * I use affective analysis in encounters with a film or artwork, in studio visits to artists, when reading, when conversing, and in everyday situations. Over the years I have taught affective analysis to many students in classes and workshops, and it works well in it-self, or as the basis for further research.
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I first realized the need for this method years ago when I was watching Charlie's Angels (McG, US, 2000). There's a scene where the brave Dylan, Drew Barrymore's character, is betrayed by her erstwhile lover moments after they have had sex. After he and his sidekick explain the conspiracy, the sidekick shoots at Dylan. She throws up her arms and falls dramatically backward through the plate-glass window of the high hotel room. Presumably she falls to her death. The film cuts to another scene and then returns to explain, in slow motion, what happened: The bullet strikes not Dylan but the window behind her. She falls back, in a cascade of shattered glass. The bedsheet catches on the window ledge, saving her life. And there she hangs, grasping the sheet, now completely naked, as the conspirators leave the hotel room.
During these scenes I noticed, to my dismay, that I got goose bumps and felt aroused! Even though the film was about "empowered," sexy, fighting women, my joyful affective response arose not from these representations but from an image of a woman menaced and vulnerable (though managing to survive). This startling response showed me that if I analyzed only the conceptual or narrative content of the film, I would entirely miss what it was doing, As Elena del Rio explains, often artworks and other cultural phenomena operate differently at the molar and molecular levels, and our responses at these levels differ as well. That is what was going on in Charlies Angel. The molar level deals with bodies as a wholes it supports identity politics, strue-Bles against constraints and struggles for representation." The molecular level deals with energies that are not yet captured by these discourses of identin, it provides a source of energy for molar-scale struggles. Because Deleuze and Guattari diagnose the body to be overcoded by ideology, they privilege the molecular nature of these encounters over the larger, molar scale at which mean-ing, narrative, thought and even emotion take place. As they argue, following Spinoza, energies operating at the molecular level are creative in themselves before they are captured and pressed into meaning at the molar level. This shift of emphasis to the molecular informs the influential argument of Brian Mas-sumi that the activities of affect are best detected at the level of the autonomic nervous system. Doing affective analysis, we are working to identify our responses along continua from the molecular to the molar, from the non-discursive to the discursive; from those parts of experience that seem free of culture and ideology to those that are clearly cultural and ideological.
Affective analysis accounts for the experience within individual sensation of forces that come from without. Guattari describes aesthetic encounters as "blocks of mutant percepts and affects, half-object half-subject, already there in sensation and outside themselves in fields of the possible." Paradoxi-cally, as he points out, affects that come from beyond are catalyzed by repre-sentations. A cognitive response stimulates an affective reaction. Thus, we usually experience affect, perception, and concept all at once, balled up, as it were: a ball of singular sensations, inextricable from one another and barely extricable from the world in which they emerged at that moment.» Affective analysis draws this ball of responses into a line. Doing this might feel rather artificial, but it helps to slow the path from affect to percept to con-cept, which makes it possible to produce well grounded concepts.
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human becoming affect as expressive world)"* Affectio is an actualization of the virtual relations between bodies, implying a relation of power (pouvoir, power over another). Affectus is the lived intensity of variations in the capacity to become (puissance, power as potential). And finally affect as pure im-manence, where the plane of immanence is a life, Deleuze writes: "complete power, complete bliss," composed of "virtualities, events, singularities." 5
For Deleuze, gaining access to the infinite entails abandoning actualiza-tion for virtuality, leaving the self behind, and becoming a vessel for pure immanence. What I aim to do in affective analysis needs to remain more grounded in lived experience. It aims to expand the lure of the singular, that twinkle of the virtual, on the individual, us reactive people caught up in our personal histories.? The impersonal state of pure immanence glimmers in the initial affective encounter; it draws the becoming like a lodestar; it is something to aspire to. But affective analysis works first to figure out, "What just happened to me?," and thus to convert pouvoir to puissance. That's why the method includes existential phenomenology, which is somewhat disparaged by Deleuzians for sticking too close to the human scale.
Before affect, culture. Autonomic responses such as goose bumps, arousal, blushing yield valuable data in affective analysis. However, these and other autonomic responses can encode cultural ideologies. Deleuze and Guattari noted that Romantic music can pull downward, appealing to history, soil, and identity and creating closure. Or it can pull outward, toward a people to come, creating openness." That's a heavy burden-revolution or fascism latent in the same sounds! You can perhaps distinguish the ways these responses of closure and openness feel in your own embodied response to music or, say, taking part in a political demonstration. Moreover, contemporary media increasingly bypass perception to mobilize affect with unprecedented skill.
As we've seen, many argue that social media, computer games, and other surveillant entertainments instrumentalize humans' very synapses and contribute to the production of what Väliaho calls the "neoliberal brain.* For these reasons, we cannot assume that our affective responses yield adequate ideas. Therefore, we need to use critical precision to identify the relations that occur between affect, percept, and concept-as well as the extra categories i suggest below of embodied response and feeling- in a given situation.
Affective analysis works case by case.
Here's how to do it:
Choose a particular moment in your experience of a movie, an artwork, or anything you wish to analyze that seems especially dense, like that ball of aflect percept concept that | mentioned, or that especially pleases, excites, or troubles
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you. You and it, and other participants, constitute a soul-assemblage, and you want to learn what it can do. Note and set aside any initial concepts you have aboutit. You will be making a triadic analysis, following Peirce's logic in which affect is First, percept is Second, and concept is Third: Affect - Percept -Concept.
Affect
1. Identify the affective responses or noncognitive thoughts that you experience at that moment.
1.1. First, you might have the good luck to experience autonomic nervous system responses. Shivering, goose bumps, or hardened nipples; arousal; blushing; a rush of adrenaline; twitching of the forehead or upper lip; and other responses over which you have. no control all constitute precious data. These responses come from something like the animal in you. However, as I noted above, even at the autonomic level our bodies are informed by culture.
1.2. Here in the realm of Firstness, you may be experiencing what Daniel Stern terms "amodal perception": perceptions that do not yet grasp their object. You may feel little becomings that occur in microtemporal periods, or vitality affects. 39 As you assemble souls with it, you may find you feel a bodily empathy with the thing you are experiencing. Are you becoming like it in any way, taking its shape or its rhythm, participating in its energy? Do you, like early twentieth-century painter Clementina Anstruther-Thomson, feel your lungs expanding, your symmetry confirmed, or not?40
Here research on mirror neurons, and its extensions into film and art theory, come into play.4l Mirror-touch synaesthesia, in which one's body responds to visual images, is a common condition, but you don't need to push it if this is not happening. * It's impossible to grasp these things without changing their character, but you can practice noticing the embodied qualities that arise, perhaps recording them in a gesture, a vocalization, or a drawing and later translating that into words.
1.3. It may be that you experience none of these. Thus, the next step IS to identify embodied responses that are more likely learned and culturally grounded. Are there tears in your eyes? Is your throat constricted? Notice what else your face— that surface that gathers
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micro-movements but is unable to act, to move away, protect itself or fight—is doing.
For example, there are many kinds of smiles— a grin, a smirk, a rictus: Which one is happening on your face? Similarly, there are many kinds of laughter, such as a belly laugh, snort, giggle, or embarrassed laugh. (Embarrassment is very useful data!) As you notice your bodily state, turn your attention to the definition of affectus as a movement to a greater or lesser power of action. Cringing, grimacing, agitation; elation, a "bursting" feeling; calm; feeling yourself open up or close down: these embodied responses are examples of Spinozan affects. Do you feel tickled? Slapped around? Such responses also call up Vivian Sochack's point, drawing on the research of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson that metaphors are not arbitrary but based in embodied experience.*
Pay attention to boredom, irritation, and other grumpy feelings. Writing in 1903, Vernon Lee vividly captures the various kinds of irritation that her encounters with art provoke, and they yield valuable data for analysis. It is only bad statues whose eyes we notice first, she writes. A painting by Ignoto Toscano at the Uffizi is "singularly out of time, the eyes violently squinting in all directions." She is "distinctly annoyed by the forward action of the three very bad Tyrannicides. They keep catching my attention and not keeping it; it is like having one's name called repeatedly."45 Often these moments of impatience indicate that the work or experience in question is trying too hard to signify.
- 1.4. If there are people in the image or phenomenon you're observing, try to imitate their posture and gesture. How does it feel?
- 1.5. In this method I try to avoid the category of emotion, so often the result of manipulation. However, my students' sensitive accounts of their feelings in response to a movie or artwork taught me that feeling is a useful category to include in the expanded notion of affective response. Some of them deploy categories of feeling in their writing that do not reduce to emotion but diffuse around the scene that gives rise to them, similar to the circulation of qi or vital energy.4 Feeling detects an atmosphere in a way that is not necessarily subjective.* I use the term feeling in an underdetermined way to indicate responses that fall somewhere between embodied response and emotion. Feelings such as wistfulness, elation, longing, dismay, and (again) embarrassment correspond closely to Spinoza's terms and can still fall short of the more coded emotions telegraphed by the work under study.
Now you have at least one and perhaps a clutch of affective responses to analyze.
Percept
- 2.1. As you accept the Secondness of your experience, amodal perception settles into modal perception, and things take form. Here, describe impartially all that you perceive with all your senses. This is similar to formal analysis. Strive to be as precise as possible, for it is likely the singularity of a color, a rhythm, a shape, a scent, or another perceptible that gave rise to the affective response. At this point, a sophisticated phenomenology kicks in: one that attends to what the body becomes in the act of perception. Here we have to acknowledge that perception, as Helen Fielding notes, requires us to "make assumptions about the world according to the systems that have already been given, according to a world that [precedes us), that is given by others."*$ Perception is blurred by convention, but it is rich with singular data nonetheless.
The longer you postpone recognition of what is before your senses, the richer and more precise your description will be. - 2.2. Recognition. Finally, at this point you can acknowledge the cultural signs that likely were apparent to you immediately, but that this exercise has asked you to repress so far. What is being represented here? Good old Saussurean and Barthesian semiotics of denotation and connotation kick in here. More subtly, what cultural filters have you learned to embody as natural? If possible, step outside your perception to identify the information-filters that have shaped it, for example in framing your visual field as though it were a photograph.*
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Concept
3. Compare the affects and percepts that arose at the moment you have chosen for analysis to move toward a concept tailored to that encounter. What did you pefceive, or what happened, that gave rise to these affective responses? What did the soul assemblage of your encounter do? The well formed concept might prove to be a Spinozian adequate idea, in that it matches the powers of the body and the capacities of the mind in a given situation." In this case. affective response will give rise to an adequate idea that increases
understanding.
But sometimes you reach no concept, no new understanding, just the painful resonance of the affects you experienced. At such an unresolved point you are stuck in paradoxical experience, as Jon Roffe explains: "the experience of something which cannot be thought, but which thereby engenders a capacity in thought-assuming it is not, however, excessive to the point of the destruction of the thinker"" Day-to-day life is full of this kind of frustrated pas-sion, since many ideas are not adequate. Something is germinating within you. The point is not to despair but, if possible, to cultivate that germina-tion: to grow a faculty to think. You need to carefully assess whether you can handle this new capacity. This feeling of disquiet may also, as we'll see in "The Feelings of Fabulation," develop into a collective capacity to act.
Here's how affective analysis works on my Charlies Angels example. My affective response occurred at the autonomic level: arousal and goose bumps. 1 described what happened narratively in the scene, but what I perceived that gave rise to those responses were the painful crash as Dylan/Drew's body smashes backward through the window, the glittering shards flying as the window shattered, and, later, the gleam of her smooth naked body as she clings to the sheet, suspended from the window ledge on a toothlike fragment of glass. These were the moments that displayed her greatest vulner-ability, made me feel it, and simultaneously made me enjoy it. Comparing my affective response with what i perceived, I conclude that I was not simply sexually attracted to her naked body, but aroused by a spectacularly sadistic image of a woman in peril. This response dismays me, to say the least, because it suggests that I share my society's general misogyny at a fundamental level-one that, in a Spinozan sense, decreases my capacity to live and increase my powers.
Now I can analyze Charlies Angels as a movie that propounds a "positive" image of women in its representations but draws its power from affects of gleeful misogyny, in the molecular-molar opposition that del Rio identifies, That's the concept: how misogyny manages to endure in a bait-and-switch between empowering representation and salacious affect. An irritatingly large number of movies work this way. Racist and other kinds of hateful cur-tural artifacts operate similarly: advertising a positive image while perpetrating sad and sickly affects. Thus my affective analysis draws to a disappointing dose. Yet such depressing concepts can lead to adequate ideas, such as how to make movies whose affects complicate and support their percepts.
In other cases the affective analysis exercise generates more salutary concepts. We can admire an artwork for the subtle ways it interweaves affects and percepts. We can analyze a conversation in terts of how molecular events of gesture, intonation, vocal musie, and allusion add texture and subtlety to the molar scale event. As we'll see, it may be the initial step of fabulation, collective imaginal action.
To complete affective analysis we need to distinguish our conclusion for lack of one) from any initial concepts we had before beginning the exercise.
Our initial concepts might be supported and enriched by the affective analy sis, in which case, bravo! But if the affective analysis does not support the initial concept, most likely it was not our own concept but a habit of thought.
For example, we may get affective responses not to the perceptible image but to an idea that it stimulates. Similarly, we might have responded affectively not to the perceptual event itself but to personal memories and associations to which it gave rise. Both of these are noteworthy responses, but on their own they will not give rise to a strong concept. It helps to take note of these responses, set them aside for later research, and begin the process anew.
However, sometimes what we arrive at in comparing affect and percept may be, if we are honest with ourselves, nothing. This result echoes Deleuze's observation, "Not that the body thinks, but, obstinate and stubborn, it forces us to think, and forces us to think what is concealed from thought, life.* At the conclusion of the careful process of affective analysis, an incapacity to think, to bring together what we perceived and what we felt, can function as a painful marker for a thought yet to come.
Here's another example of how affective analysis can proceed.*
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"Can Anyone Really Register Trauma?"
Mounira Al Solh made Now Eat My Script (2014) in Lebanon as refugees from the Syrian civil war began to pour into the country. In the first years after the Syrian civil war began in 2011, reporters and documentarists deployed many strategies to try to inform audiences about the Syrian gov ernment's inconceivable brutality against its own citizens. They struggled to activate that knowledge into empathy, and empathy into action, despite the well known phenomenon of compassion fatigue. In contrast, Al Solhs Now Eat My Script steps back from political representation and adopts the strategy of suspending emotional response. She soberly, deliberately asks what documentary can do, while exposing herself and the viewer to glimpses of unthinkable things.
The artist narrates that her aunt is visiting from Damascus with the lamb she has slaughtered to celebrate her son's successful Canadian citizenship test. Most of the video's visual field is occupied by a very slow overhead pan of the parts of the slaughtered animal, laid out on pristine white paper like precious artifacts: the glistening heart, the accusing eyeballs, muscle and bone obscenely exposed. Meanwhile Al Solh's text enumerates a series of traumas that must be documented, chiefly from the genocidal Syrian war.
"Can anyone really register trauma?" she asks.
Now Eat My Script works carefully on levels of affection, perception, and concept, all coolly laid out and observed. It tests the idea that truth in representation requires including the representer, as well as feelings that appear trivial or "merely" personal. As it begins, a text explains paradoxically that the writer of the video, who is pregnant, does not have a script for this video.
It describes the arrival of Syrian refugees in the writer's neighborhood, looking for parking. The text recalls how, comparably, the writer's family left Lebanon for the safety of Damascus in 1989 at a dangerous period in the Lebanese civil war, and how they as refugees tried to retain their bourgeois status. The soft sounds, whispers, and echoes of Nadim Mishlawi's sound design susurrate, opening up a space in which an audience can consider what it might be like to have to flee: not in the immiserated "bare life" of an imagined refugee, but as the deliberate decision to pack up what's important, make financial provisions, soothe children, and hasten to hoped-for safety. The camera slowly pans the contents of a heavily packed car—a heap of bags tied onto the roof, jars of food, cabbages-as the text recalls the Beirut-Damascus taxi driver who charmed the checkpoint guards back in
1989. It's the cabbages that grip my heart-smooth and dense, long-lasting, nutritious; I can imagine someone hefting them and placing them in the back
The text explains that the writer is trying to write a dissertation on what it is like to be "pregnant, penetrated, and feminist" and that the video is concerned with the task of witnessing trauma. Her pregnancy recurs as the reason she is unable to focus on the subject. As the camera contemplates the lamb's testicles, smooth and pearly, filigreed with red veins, the text notes that there are jokes about people who try to commit suicide from Beirut's landmark Pigeon Rock and fail. "It's mostly a male figure in those jokes." Because text and image retain the restrained tone of objective documentation, a gap is created. Now the task falls to the viewer to bring to mind those hapless would-be suicides who trip as they throw themselves from the rock formation, and who now must deal with humiliation on top of the bankruptcy or broken heart that made them choose death. If you let yourself go there, the burden of empathy is unbearable.
Just as drily, the text relates a story of Syrian fighter who ate the heart of a man he killed. "The writer read a text aloud: 'Get rid of meaning, your mind is a nightmare that has been eating you: now eat your mind!" While eating the barbecued lamb ribs, the artist's family learns from the radio of the Syrian government's chemical attack on civilians in Ghouta that killed hundreds, dating this barbecue to August 11, 2013. *What does it mean to slaughter?' asked one as we chewed on ribs." Once again refusing judgment and sentimentality, the video continues to pass on to the viewer the question of how to respond. Sounds fizz, crackle, and sussurate, widening the gap in which we the audience might attempt to grieve the massacre at Ghouta, since nobody else is. Disquiet amplifies to a roar. As the lamb's now-useless jaw and brain are presented to us-what use is it to think or talk?-the text argues that trauma can't be shown. Writing always comes after trauma. The writer's most difficult and important task is to report. Now Al Solh's eyes face us gravely as she holds up two written notes to the camera:
"I/she read these thoughts and my second mind thought, I'm hungry!"
Now Eat My Script could have expressed the emotions that Al Solh's stories might elicit-grief, rage, horror-and thus compressed the viewer's volatile responses into an easy-to-swallow cathartic pill. Instead she encourages us to linger in feedback loops of less righteous, more complex feelings that start
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with the body. By bypassing any kind of catharsis, using the "excuse" of her pregnancy, Al Solh gives over to the viewer the impossible responsibility of bearing witness to the suffering of others, of empathizing with massacred Syrian civilians and the others whose heartbreaking stories the video relates in a seemingly offhand way.
At the conclusion of my affective analysis, Now Eat My Script leaves the attentive viewer in an untenable state. I am left quivering with feelings that can't be resolved. I feel compelled to compare my bodily capacities to the slaughtered lamb's. Is my brain capable of comprehending this genocide by Bashar al-Assad's government of its own citizens, or even a single painful death? Are my eyes capable of witnessing? My mouth of speech that would make a difference? What strength do I have in my muscles that could fight this injustice? Can my sexual organs support a conatus, a will to thrive, that would strengthen my resolve to act? If not, am I dead too?
Now Eat My Script precisely addresses the (in)capacity of art to register trauma and makes an ethical demand on the viewer that may be impossible to meet. My monad experiences this disquiet as a stretching of its amplitude, its capacities to know and to feel. Like Al Solh, it soberly tests its capacity for witnessing while protecting its body, the source of life for me at least, from the harm of borrowed trauma. Maybe it is not necessary to register trauma in order to act ethically. Muting empathy and quieting emotion do not translate
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into stilling speech and action, which take shape around the penumbra of the unthinkable.
Affective analysis is especially useful with those experiences and cultural texts that seem opaque or illegible but that stick with you uncomfortably for a long time. The method stays with the discomfort, not forcing it into a Procrustes' bed of discursive or ideological meaning but allowing discourse to emerge from a careful and gradual process. Affective analysis can begin in the body's feelings of discomfort and gradually shape into an understanding of how a movie-or any experience-creates thought precisely by beginning where thought is most difficult. As I noted above, sometimes affective analysis concludes not with a new concept but with painful disquiet, which may be the witness to an emerging capacity for thinking.