Affect

• In Event: 28.037 - *CANCELLED* Timespacemattering: An Invitation to Create a Manifesto for Justice in Higher Education

Abstract

Affect according to Massumi (2015), (drawing on Spinoza’s definition) is “the capacity to affect or be affected” and “is directly relational, because it places affect in the space of relation: between an affecting and a being affected. It focuses on the middle, directly on what happens between. More than that, it forbids separating passivity from activity “ (2015, p.91). Massumi argues that affect cannot be reduced to one thing, but rather requires the manyness of its forms. Affect is regarded as “an event, or a dimension of every event.” (2015,p.47). Affect is experienced as an in-betweennesss, re/membering re/turning and capacitation of the body, which is “completely bound up with the lived past of the body”.(ibid, p.49). Massumi asserts that relationality is the “virtual co-presence of potentials” (2015, p.5). He relates to the “wriggle room” to freedom which we find by accessing and exploring our ability to “belong with and to other places” (ibid:9). Engaging in a politics of affect cannot be done in language but in becoming engaged through both material and non-material processes. This requires one to engage and place oneself “in the middle, in a fairly indeterminate, fairly vague situation, where things meet at the edges and pass into each other” (2015,p.43).Of importance for affect is to “involve oneself in an “ethic of caring, caring for belonging, which has to be a nonviolent ethic that involves thinking of your local actions as modulating a global state” (2015:45).

Author

• Karen Collett