The Equal and Opposite Reaction of Affect

If we accept that to every action there is an equal and opposite reaction, we could speak of affect as the body's response to actuality. I choose to not phrase it as the body's response to an actuality because this would imply that actuality exists as a stop-and-go progression of discrete events that elicits a stop-and-go progression of discrete responses from our body. In the same way that consciousness and sensation are continuous, so is affect, except that the response of affect is delayed by a half-second! Affect is the body’s outcome, its response-ability to actuality sensed. If a plant has reactive ability, a response-ability to its environment, we could say for example that its heliotropy represents its affective reaction to photic energy. As Kant posits “the effect of an object upon the faculty of representation so far as we are affected by the set object is sensation." Kant doesn’t seem to provide for affect: the faculty of representation which “realizes” sensation would be the terminal point/satisfaction of the effect of an object as a given. It’s a massive pile-up at the dead-end of the one-way street where the representation of the image is the end all and be all of “intuition.” There is too much energy coming in without it being dissipated: the process of dissipation of this energy is affect.

Although Bergson and Deleuze are the philosophers most talked about in film theory today, Kant is likely the more influential and to date the more enduring in that his ideas appear to lay the foundation for the way that understanding happens in Film Theory. Most of orthodox film theory conceives the spectator as a passive, inactive onlooker that soaks in the glow from the screen, like ablack hole: a Kantian disembodied sensibility that mediates the subject-object relation where the faculty of representation is simply a reflection of the spectacle. The plant example constitutes an interesting metaphor for film--unless one is a botanist or an avid gardener, one never considers the plant as a heliotropic organism; the sun beams its rays, and the plant takes them in. Although it is a dynamic relation, it is conceived as a simple predicate imbued with stasis: the sun is up-above, invariable in its beaming, and the plant is below, impassively ever-receptive.

But given affect, we can position the spectator so as to dismiss the idea of the passive observer “taking in” the spectacle; we could liken him to the plant bathing in sunlight and the physical and psychological reaction to the imagery unfolding on the screen as his very own heliotropy. And like the slow-moving plant, there is a certain amount of activity going on behind that deceptively static impassive facade. There is movement happening on account of the sensorial activity taking place: the retina is being bombarded with varying intensities and frequencies light, and the eardrum is vibrating (as is the rest of the body’s surface) in conjunction with the varying low-frequency pressure waves emerging from the speakers. Movement implies change--the causal principle requires it. And to this onslaught of energy on our sensoria, the body reacts: the pulse quickens, the palms moisten, the pupils dilate, the mouth gets dry, our legs tense up... we don’t register any of these responses individually unless we pay particular attention, but while we monitor one, the rest are still going... we usually register them all together, as a bundle, as the envelope curve of the body’s reaction... as affect.