<underfire> More on the affects of organized abandonment

[Amit Rai]

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/



Best,


Dr. Amit S. Rai

Assistant Professor in Global Literatures and Film
Department of English
Florida State University
Tallahassee, FL 32306-1580

W: 850.645.1459
Fax: 850.644.0811


On 10-Dec-06, at 5:24 PM, brian.holmes at wanadoo.fr wrote:

>
> I am very much in agreement with all the points that Dan makes,  
> except part
> of the last one.
>
> The use of the word "blight" as a justification for the assertion of
> eminent domain is symptomatic of the whole situation in the US  
> today. When
> they say "blight", what that refers to now is any condition of  
> property or
> inhabitation that is perceived to lower values in a given area. The  
> result
> is that a person has no right to use value, if that keeps anyone  
> else from
> realizing profitable exchange value. Translated into pragmatic  
> terms, what
> that means is that if the market doesn't like the looks of your  
> house, you
> can be kicked out or expropriated. But try and think about the  
> abstract
> formulation. Try and think about a condition where one has no right  
> to use
> value.
>
> There are tremendous racist crimes being committed in the United  
> States,
> specifically, and across the world, in accord with this total  
> priority of
> exchange value. But this kind of crime affects everyone - white or  
> black,
> Arab, Christian, Hindu, Jew, etc. - who can still be sensitive to  
> the dream
> of (that means, the utopia of, and the aspiration to) a better life  
> which
> is not their personal property, whose promise is not limited to  
> them alone.
> I don't think the problem can or should be entirely racialized.  
> Against the
> logic of the ban, and the fact of organized abandonment, the ideal of
> equality can still be a guide to real political struggle. Perhaps  
> that is
> the single most important thing I know how to say.
>
> best to all, Brian
>
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