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Anna Hickey-Moody
259
Affective relations
Affect is the concept of taking something on, of changing in relation
to an experience or encounter. Deleuze employs this term in differing
ways. I am interested in the notion of affectus, a kind of movement
that encompasses subjective modulation. In Spinoza, Practical Philosophy
Deleuze (1998) describes affectus as an increase or decrease of the power
of acting, for the body and the mind alike. He expands this denition
through arguing that affectus is different from emotion. Affectus is the
virtuality and materiality of the increase or decrease effected in a bodys
power of acting. He states:
The affection refers to a state of the affected body and implies the
presence of the affecting body, whereas the affectus refers to the passage [or movement] from one state to another, taking into account
the correlative variation of the affecting bodies. Hence there is a difference in nature between the image affections or ideas and the feeling
affect.
(Deleuze, 1998, p. 49)
Affectus is the materiality of change: the passage from one state to
another which occurs in relation to affecting bodies. The image, affections, or ideas to which Deleuze refers are generated by a specic kind
of movement. It is the movement of increasing or decreasing ones
capacity to act: the virtual and material change that prompts the affection or feeling of affect in the consciousness of the body in question.
As a model for theorizing pedagogy, affectus differs from existing theorizations of subjective change as a kind of cultural pedagogy, such
as those put forward by Giroux (1999a, 1999b; 2004a, 2004b), Lusted
(1986) and McWilliam (1996), in the respect that affectus is a posthuman
pedagogy. Posthuman because it is grounded in interpersonal relations,
it is people responding to the materiality of art. Affectus is, in part, a
rhythmic trace of the world incorporated into a body-becoming, an
expression of an encounter between a corporeal form and forces that
are not necessarily human. Literature, sound, dance, are media that
prompt affective responses and generate affectus: a synergy, a machinicassemblage that is bigger than the sum of its parts. In creating subjective
change or a modulation1 in the form of affectus, such media can be
considered posthuman pedagogies: art as a material force of change.
Affect as pedagogy
Albrecht-Crane and Slack (2007), Ellsworth (2005), Kofoed and Ringrose
(2012) and Watkins (2005) are theoreticians of education or pedagogy
who work with the idea of affect. Albrecht-Crane and Slack (2007,
p. 191) argue: [t]he importance of affect . . . is inadequately considered
in scholarship on pedagogy and, while the work of theorists cited above
moves to address this gap in research, this concept has the potential to
recongure theories of pedagogy and indeed education in signicant
ways. One of these ways is through rendering the teaching object as
a non human body. For example, art is a mode of producing subjectivity. Thus, it is pedagogical. Deleuze and Guattari (1996) argue that
works of art can be thought as consisting of compounded collections
of percepts and affects. A percept is a physical fragment of the world
imagined in and through the artwork. An affect is the sense or feeling
that is enmeshed with the materiality of the artwork. Combined in art,
percepts and affects constitute a bloc of sensations (1996, p. 176). Blocs
of sensations are the language with which art, as a culture, speaks:
Art is the language of sensations. Art does not have opinions. Art
undoes the triple organisation of perceptions, affections and opinions
in order to substitute a monument composed of percepts, affects and
blocs of sensations that take the place of language . . . A monument
does not commemorate or celebrate something that happened but
condes to the ear of the future the persistent sensations that embody
the event: the constantly renewed suffering of men and women, their
re-created protestations, their constantly resumed struggle.
(Deleuze and Guattari, 1996, pp. 176177)
Art works are monuments, entities that propel the political agendas of
those for whom they speak. Art works create a new sensory landscape for
their beholder. These simultaneous acts of propelling a political agenda
and creating a sensory landscape occur through an artworks affective
potential. This is the way a work of art can make its observer feel; the
connection(s) a work prompts its observer to make. The materiality of
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changed by art and seeing this change as a kind of learning, mobilizes the idea of a being of sensation as teacher, in order to interrogate
the nature of affective forces produced by art works and the social,
machinic assemblages they are produced within and which, in turn,
they effect. As a femifesta for paying attention to the impact held by
the materiality of art and feminist scholarship, this chapter constitutes
a folding together of multiple pasts and opens up many little futures
in which we can think about artistic affect as a materialist, posthuman
pedagogy. Art teaches in ways we are only beginning to see.
Note
1. I employ the term modulation because it avoids teleological overheads that
accompany the idea of transformation, which is another word used to
articulate the materiality of change from on state to another.
References
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Palgrave), pp. 99110.
Colman, F. (2008) Notes on the Feminist Manifesto: The Strategic Use of Hope,
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Colman, F. (2014) The Practice-As Research Manifesto, Tate Working Papers,
http://www.tate.org.uk/research/research-centres/learning-research/workingpapers/practice-as-research-manifesto, accessed 24 January 2015.
Deleuze, G. (1990) The Logic of Sense (New York: Colombia University Press).
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