<<TRANSMATHOME

1.3 Affects

A crucial question can now be asked. What sort of practice is being set out and exemplified here ? What kind of engagement is this,  given the use of the idea of the Cosmos, and the ideas of bodies and forces? Is it, for instance, scientific?

The answer to the last question is that although it engages with the same fields engaged by science, it is not scientific in mode. This point is made at the outset of A Thousand Plateaus, albeit in a way which is too nuanced to be addressed in detail at this stage: ‘Nowhere do we claim for our concepts the title of a science. We are no more familiar with scientificity than we are with ideology; all we know are assemblages (TP p.23)’ The answer to the wider question is given a few lines earlier, and is to the effect that the mode of thought is Schizoanalysis, Rhizomatics, Stratoanalysis, Pragmatics, Micropolitics... It can be seen that this answer embodies one of the basic explicative problems of the thesis, and therefore at this stage is barely an answer.

However, the question can be re-worked in a way which will begin to show how this is the start of a  further deepening of the affective idea of thought that is at the centre of all this. In this form, the question is, ‘what is the ‘facultative’ field of modulations that is the main concomitant of the form of communication in question?’ Answering this question will at the same time be a fourth departure from the initial distribution of ideas, and will be the start of the explicit process of giving an account of ‘pragmatics’.

The answer is that the form of engagement in question is the going into effect of co-emplaced and inter-fused fields of real connections. In more detail, it is the apprehension of a field of affects on the part of a zone, or the apprehension of a field of forms of engagement on the part of a phylum of zones.  The idea of affects is the idea of real connections, and it is also the idea of becomings, where these becomings can be either intensificatory or de-intensificatory in nature. An example can be a person, with their affects in connection with places, groups, individuals, animals, the materials of particular art-forms, etc.  Again, a further example can be a society, say a pre-state, or ‘primitive’ society. It is a question here of the going into effect of a field of connections: the connections between the society and the features and climatic aspects of the landscape; between the society and its crops and prey animals; between the society and its totemic animals; between the society and neighbouring societies. It can be pointed out at this stage that the distinction between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ can be anomalous in the case of this mode of engagement. When, for instance, Nietzsche lays out the affect of bad conscience as emplaced within social fields it is important to see that with respect to an individual it is both the case  that there is an extrinsic  modulatory  and pro-genitive field made up of practises, institutions and modes of production of language (that which X has been affected by, and with which X is in a de-intensificatory becoming) and that insofar as the affect has been taken up or incorporated the individuals themselves are actively and idiosyncratically (or singularly) a part of this modulatory field. The outside here is both outside and inside, in that although it is primarily outside the affected body, it is also an aspect of the functioning of this body.

Two further points need to be made. The first is that the range of the engagement involved in the apprehension of affects centrally includes the going into effect of past encounters or incorporations, and does not require a current encounter. It is therefore centrally or decisively trans-temporal in nature. It is a question of seeing becomings (free and de-intensificatory becomings) of bodies or multiplicities, or of seeing affects. But it is also a question of this seeing having a fundamentally trans-temporal modality. The functioning of the past encounters   lays bare threads that are hard to take in or discern at the level of a current engagement. The second point is that the field of affects also includes the field of connections that are described in terms of the language of desire. The question of desire is here brought into focus as a question of intensive and productive connections, where the connections can be wholly intensificatory, but where they can also take the form of a production which on one side is a part of an overall de-intensification. This is the positive and productive understanding of desire which is initially set out in Anti-Oedipus (desire saved from the notion of ‘lack’ -  ‘From the moment lack is re-introduced into desire, all of desiring–production is crushed’[4]). The question of the apprehension of affects therefore is one which ‘includes’ questions of analysis of fields in terms of desire, given that desire is affect or becoming.

 What name can be given to this mode of engagement? It is the faculty-affect of the discerning of affects or becomings; the  grasping of intensive connections (which at its furthest point involves the grasping of connections between bodies and attributes or planes of the cosmos). The name that will be taken up in what follows will be the invented term ‘trans-prehension’, where the prefix ‘trans’ is employed primarily to suggest connections that pass between  bodies and fields of bodies. The discerning of affects involves engagement with bodies as fields of connections in a way which transects topographical boundaries, and it is this which is at stake in the selection of the prefix.

It is now possible to answer the wider question concerning the main way of working or modality being exemplified here by A Thousand Plateaus. The answer is that this modality is the going into effect of inter-meshed fields and nodes of affects being expressed  through the faculty of language, in the form of writing (in particular, however, it is important to see that the discerning of affective connections does not just involve singular phyla – it also involves the fields of zones that are the aspects or planes of the Cosmos). It is not that the field picked out as ‘science’ does not also involve the faculty-affect of trans-prehension: it is that science is pre-eminently engaged along the lines of structure, functions, periodicity, and regularity (etc.) . In contrast,  the way of working exemplified here by A Thousand Plateaus  is in large part a question of a delineation in the form of a ‘Cosmos philosophy’ (TP p.342) which charts the assemblages and connections of the suppressive modes which are taken up by group and individual bodies; and which delineates engagements of bodies with the attributes of the cosmos. It can be seen therefore why the names ‘pragmatics’ and ‘micropolitics’ are used. It is a question of a transcendental delineation which  is nothing other than the setting into effect of users-guides for being a body, and  for being an element in wider multiplicities. As has been seen language in its generative (non-constrictive) mode is the communication of engagements, so that this means that expressions of the scientific mode in language are also to be understood as user’s guides. The difference is that science on its own is the transmission of engagements having the form of the controlling of systems and the making of systems, whereas pragmatics concerns micropolitical movements onto lines of flight - movements involving the breaking loose of fields of becomings. Pragmatics starts from the phyla of the intensive cosmos, and from the zones and forces of the planet and its elements, and it communicates processes of escape (lines of flight). 

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