The Logic Of Sensation - Tim Brooks

THE LOGIC OF SENSATION (IN THE INSTITUTION)

TIM BROOKS

Gilles Deleuze, ‘Painting and Sensation’, in The Logic of Sensation, London: Continuum, 2003.

The And/Or Sensation

1

Gilles Deleuze articulates in the chapter ‘Painting and Sensation’ from The Logic of Sensation two differing methods of going beyond the figurative.

There is that of abstraction, whereby there is an effort to distil or extract the figure into an non-representational form, and in doing so, Deleuze categorises this with actions of the head, of thought. As such this is not immediately sensed or felt. Contrasting this is a method Deleuze terms the Figure, or sensation. This is associated with the nervous system, of flesh, and thus is felt. Sensation does not need to be explained, to be ‘workedout’, and as such appears to operate outside of narrative. Sensation is described as a shifting, non-static force which operates across and between multiple “orders”, being felt and thus interpreted in that specific moment. Deleuze explains that sensation has “one face turned toward the subject … and one face turned towards the object”, and is thus neither, and both, at the same time.

This and/or pluralism brings to mind the figure of the flaneur, defined by Baudelaire as “a person who walks the city in order to experience it”. They are at once a distant observer of the urban environment, but through the action of movement, (of strolling) and being, they are in fact very much a part of the city. Whilst the flaneur’s sensation of the city is felt personally, it operates on and across varying orders, scales and influences (both preconceived beliefs and more ephemeral subconscious ideas) and as such is irreducible. Deleuze describes sensation similarly as “snapshots of motion”, where varying levels of sensation are captured, in that instant only, and given a Figure, which then dissipates and changes as the sensation does. The flaneur as a literary type observes and experiences the city into their own snapshot, and similarly the paintings of Francis Bacon viscerally depict sensation, seeking to portray forces otherwise invisible.

Deleuze writes of an active diagram, where workings and re-workings are overlayed to create multiplicitous levels which, although separate, combine to create a unified ‘sensation’. The diagram in this case is not a defined, finished figure but “is a possibility of fact – it is not the fact itself”.

One starts with the figurative and “probabilistic givens”, or ideas already thought out beforehand, but then must allow for a “catastrophe” to occur.

The act of doing must mess up preconceived ideas to get to their essential sensation. In this way Deleuze states “The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm”.

Cover Image: Edward Curtis - Bustelier Gropius, 1927.

Deleuze writes of an active diagram where workings and reworkings are overlayed to create multiplicitous levels which, although separate, combine to create a unified ‘sensation’.

2

Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect”, in Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002.

Operating between Either/Neither

Similar to Deleuze’s notion of “catastrophe” in the diagram, Brian Massumi speaks in his discussion with Joel McKim of a “shock” that must occur prior to an event which facilitates an affect. This shock can be major, but can similarly occur on the periphery of realisation, acting as a “microperception”. Nevertheless this acts as a jolt which allows the self to recognise a differing sensation. Importantly, this occurs in an “inbetweenness” between object and subject, between affecting and affected.

Massumi is interested in the “relations” that become apparent in this either/neither space, or “region”, for it is in this space that it is possible to “create new potentials for the future”.

The shock is based on our personal and individual presuppositions that we bring to all encounters, and it is these “tendencies” of behaviour and thought which influence and connect the in-between space – but in doing this (for this is an active pursuit) one begins to question these links. If you “accept the challenge to regenerate your terms, and their cohesion to each other” you can begin to comprehend a “rational complex, a nexus, rather than a particular definition”. For the goal is not an answer, but a series of potentialities, or multiple and divergent possibilities for the future.

Massumi advocates for a continual act of becoming.

It is these “tendencies� of behaviour and thought which influence and connect the in-between space

3

Georges Teyssot, ‘The Mutant Body of Architecture’ in Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, Flesh: Architectural Probes, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1994.

Multifarious images of Self

In his discussion of the work of Diller + Scofidio The Mutant Body of Architecture, Georges Teyssot explains that although architecture can be used as a tool to maintain socio-political conventions, it is also capable of carving away at the cultural ‘body’, challenging implicit notions of our understanding of this body. Physiology categorises different sensory actions of the body into those of the surface, exposed to the exterior (exteroception), those of the organs on the interior (interoception) and those which situate us in space (proprioception). A closer analysis of this however reveals situations in which clear distinctions can be blurred.

The use of technology (in the broadest sense a ‘tool’) by a body begins a process of “incorporation”, allowing one to acquire new abilities which eventually, through use, become so constitutive with our image of the self that the technology becomes us. Technology can be relied on to the point of becoming as vital as interior organs, or more specifically an extension of them, whereby our external perceptions are thrown beyond the confines of the body. Teyssot argues that it is this relation between organ and tool which “defines our action on space”, and thus one of the roles of architecture is to define and imagine space not merely as that for the ‘natural’ body but for the extended technological sphere that we project outwards from the body. This process of learning (and thus adapting and becoming something ‘else’) suggests the understanding that our body is capable of holding multiple or shifting images of our self, and has strong ties to Massumi’s notions of “becoming”.

Our body is capable of holding multiple or shifting images of our ‘self’

Nigel Thrift, “Intensities of Feeling: Towards a Spatial Politics of Affect”, in Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, Volume 86, Issue 1, March 2004, pp. 57–78.

The Power is Nigel Thrift begins his paper Intensities of Feeling: towards a spatial of Affect questioning why the study of affect in our cities has been (Y)ours politics neglected beyond the pages of novels or poems. He gives three reasons

4

why affect (as a part of the urban condition) should be studied. Firstly, that knowledge of affect has become critical for an individual because of its role in our day to day life. Secondly, because affect is “deployed” knowingly but also politically, to favour an individual or sector of the community. Thirdly, because cities now justify their existence, and sell themselves to the world, through the utilization of affect, with Thrift noting that cities are “expected to have ‘buzz’, to be ‘creative’, and to generally bring forth powers of invention and intuition”. This harnessing of affect can of course be used by cities for economic purposes. Thrift argues that the growing manipulation and “engineering” of affect in cities, to the degree that it becomes as important to the civic network as more traditional infrastructural systems, only increases the importance of studying affect.

Thrift defines affect as a form of thinking that is active. Whilst this thinking may be “indirect and reflective” it is still a form of thinking, not operating in the realm of the irrational or sublime. As such, Thrift relates four contemporary conditions which influence affect and its role within the politics of the city. The first is the form of poltics, with the fall in political engagement through “traditional agencies exemplified by parties and churches” (Norris, 2002) and the subsequent rise in political involvement through alternative means, or “ad-hoc, contextual, and specific activities of choice”(Norris, 2002). The rise of “agencies of choice” emphasises the forms of representation of affect, where the imaging of affective appeals is used for political means. Secondly, this increasing reliance on media sees the presentation of politics “which emphasize the performance of emotion as being an index of credibility”. Thirdly, perceptions of affect are no longer thought of as an immediate presence, but rather as something that can be “stretched and intensified, widened and condensed”.Thrift believes the opening up (or closing down) of this perception now goes beyond Agamben’s notions of biopolitics, into that of “micro-biopolitics”, whereby the gap between thought and action can be manipulated by various entities and institutions, often using techniques which operate specifically within this space. The fourth development of politics influencing affect is the ways in which urban space can now be produced or engineered for political ends, often through the “semi-formal guise” of event management, logistics and lighting.

Whilst the increasing politicalisation of affect discussed by Thrift is described as quite alarming, it seems that if affect operates within the realm described earlier, that of an active thought rather than an irrational reaction, then the attempts to engineer or manipulate affect as it occurs within the city can be recognised as such by the individual. What this then relies on then is an increased awareness of these manipulations. Whilst Thrift talks about the increasing mediatization of society, he appears to see this only from the perspective of those that manipulate it for political gain. Alternatively, the rise of “agencies of choice” in post-industrial Western societies (for this is the realm we are really operating in) allows

The rise of “agencies of choice� allows for a multiple of perspectives and viewpoints to be sourced, allowing an individual to understand differing perspectives and (hopefully) comprehend when their affective faculties are being engineered.

for a multiple of perspectives and viewpoints to be sourced, allowing an individual to understand differing perspectives and (hopefully) comprehend when their affective faculties are being engineered. What this ultimately relies on though is the individual to actively pursue, question and reflect on their own affective perceptions and how these relate to the wider (multiple) community.

5

Michel Foucault, ‘Spaces and Classes’ in The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London: Routledge, 1989.

Three Looking beyond the physical body, Foucault discusses in his chapter and Classes’ from The Birth of the Clinic other modes of Spatializations of ‘Spaces spatialising disease. Prior to the “anatomo-clinical” method on which Disease contemporary medicine is based, Foucault classifies a knowledge base

entitled classificatory medicine, a method of medical examination which is free from localization in space. This method is historical, rather than philosophical in its focus, whereby the gaze is preferenced. For example, symptoms are observed as discrete events which, when combined, aide in diagnosis. This operates outside of time, with no relationships or networks discerned. The idea of resemblance is particularly important to classificatory medicine, in that “formal similarities” of the illness are favoured over “perspective distribution”. Things operate on “only one plane and there is only one movement”. It is through similarities that the “rational order of the disease” makes itself apparent.

Within classificatory medicine, a process of three spatializations take place. In order to diagnose correctly through analysis of the “essential nucleus”, the doctor must first remove or “abstract” the “disturbances” the patient brings with him from the act of living. To ‘gaze’ at the disease one must subtract the body. Once this is done it is possible to then discern the disease in its true ‘natural’ state. This is the primary spatialization of the disease, where it is stated “The time of the body does not effect, and still less determines, the time of the disease”. Through this gaze one must begin to ascertain qualitative differences, and this neccessitates the re-introduction of the individual, the patient. This is the secondary spatialization, whereby “The patient is the rediscovered portrait of the disease; he is the disease itself”. The tertiary spatialization of the disease provides the ‘social spaces’ for the preceeding modes of spatialization to take place.

During the secondary spatialization of the disease “The patient is the rediscovered portrait of the disease; he is the disease itself�

6

Tony Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex”, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics, London: Routledge, 1995, excerpt, pp. 59-79.

Democratisation of Tony Bennett agrees with Foucault in “The Exhibitionary Complex” from his The Birth of the Museum that during the 18th century the spectacle the Centre book of the sovereign state’s power was internalised, taken from the overt public displays of punishment and “integrated into the very body of the state apparatus” (Foucault, 1977). However, he conversely argues that institutions were undergoing the opposite transformation – that the institution went from the private (internal) domain into that of the public sphere. Rather than the demise of overt displays of power in society, Bennett sees the rise of the institution as a new tool in which the state could manipulate and exercise power/knowledge relations.

The 19th century saw the rise of large exhibitions and World Fairs, and with them a specific architectural spatialisation. When combined with a number of other factors as described by Bennett, there began to be made apparent a correlation between society and the spectacle. The inner workings of the city began to be opened to the public, with the view that a city could be “visible, and hence knowable, as a totality”. The state began to be involved in the funding of cultural institutions, which became an important part in the “formation of the modern state”, with its new imaging as “a set of educative and civilizing agencies”. These same institutions became a “permanent display of knowledge/power”, where beyond the transitory exhibitions, the institution was able to “continually [display] its ability to command, order, and control objects and bodies, living or dead”. These ideas culminated in the exhibitionary halls and institutions (along with the shopping arcades and malls), whereby the organisation of goods became the embodiment of national accomplishments. Within these spaces there was an interchangeability between subject and object, with the public able to be on display and view the display – the crowd became the spectacle.

Bennett sees this as a democratisation of the centre of Bentham’s panopticon model, whereby all have access to view the other.

The inclusive nature of these spaces led people to share ownership of these national accomplishments, and thus behave and perform the role which was orderly and methodically described to them by the state. This led to self regulation in an effort to fulfil or maintain the ‘appropriate’ power relation with the state.

By viewing themselves through the eyes of the state the exhibitionary crowd remained docile.

7

Michel Foucault, ‘Panopticism’ in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, London: Penguin, 1991.

Inward/outward Foucault describes in “Panopticism” from Disciplince and Punish: the Birth the Prison how the strictly regimented measures aimed at controlling power structures of the plague brought about two differing “political dreams” in seventeenth

century society. Disciplinary and punitive measures filtrated into miniscule daily activities, with clear power hierarchies expressed and enacted. This meant that individuals were classified and ordered according to their “true” nature and made to behave accordingly. The opposite of this was the dream of the festival - a space where regimentation and rule were suspended and hierarchies dissolved. Hence, the individual was able to freely associate with others and indentify within a wider collective.

Attempts to segment and compartmentalise the plage meant that rather than seeking a “pure society” (through the act of expelling the unwanted) a “disciplined society” was desired. In the former the individual is assigned a “binary branding” of normal/abnormal, and is thus apportioned their status in society’s hierarchy through confinement. Within a diciplinary society however there are multiple seperations and individualisations, with the “correct training” then applied after careful analysis and distribution.

Foucault sees the institution in the nineteenth century as the tool in which the compartmentalised ‘abnormal’ individual was then attempted to be corrected and treated - to be monitored, supervised, and ultimately healed.

In this way the ideals of the disciplinary society were then applied to those excluded from the “pure society”. Foucault writes that there are two images of discipline, with the inward looking “enclosed institution” one extreme, of “exceptional discipline”. At the other extreme is panopticism, whereby power is made “lighter, more rapid, more effective” through coercion and surveillance.

ENCLOSED INSTITUTION

PANOPTIC SOCIETY

8

Jan Verwoert, ‘Exhaustion an Exuberance’ in Tell Me What You Want, What You Really, Really Want, Sternberg Press, 2010.

Is prolonging Jan Verweort outlines in the chapter “Exhaustion and Exuberance” from book Tell me what you want, what you really, really want the highly “I Can” the same the performative society that we live in. Moving beyond menial labour work, as saying “I we each now ‘perform’ various duties in an effort to get things done.

Can’t”? Transactions are no longer based on man-power but on information.

Verweort is interested in the conditions in which these ideas are generated and the effect this has on a greater feeling of communality. In the midst of ‘performing’ to the requests and deadlines of others, we start to forget who these actions are ultimately serving and benefitting and whether this is stifling ourselves personally, and subsequently the community in which we operate. Underlying this idea is the broader question of political ethics - “How can we know what would be the right thing to do to make a better life possible for ourselves and others, now and in the future?” Verweort proposes that the answer to this is impossible to respond to because of the highly varying context in which it is asked, and that instead of answering this with a binary yes/no, either/or response the answer “lies precisely in opening up the space of those other options through the categorical refusal to accept the forceful imposition of any terms”. Verweort believes that we can use “imagination and the aesthetic experience” as tools in creating a resistance, by responding to performative pressures with the response “I Can’t”.

The “I Can’t” response can be purely non-active, with no alternative given, and as such operates as anti-performance, a refusal to comply by doing nothing. This approach however means you are no longer able to influence outcomes, you have removed yourself completely from the scenario.

Verweort argues that we need to find ways in which the performance of “ ‘I Can’t’ [is] performed in the key of ‘I Can’ “. One possible way for this to occur is to embrace latency, which is the antithesis of our high performance culture. Because our society is so biased towards outcomes, we can become exhausted by constantly performing what is required of us.

Embracing latency allows us to operate without a deadline, without outside pressure to perform, and thus can give us space for personal growth. The graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister utilises latency in his enforcing of a year long sabbatical every six years (his ideas on this policy are described in his TED talk presentation “The power of time off” http://www.ted.com/ talks/lang/eng/stefan_sagmeister_the_power_of_time_off.html).In closing his office and not taking any paid work Sagmeister uses this period as breathing space to refresh and develop ideas which otherwise get pushed aside in the constant performance of getting things done. In this way he tells clients “I can’t” but does so in the belief that any developments or ideas generated during his sabbatical will ultimately feed back into new jobs when the time comes to say “I Can” once more. The policy appears then to prolong the eventual “I Can” for a period rather than really figuring out a new approach which would allow him to operate more reactively against ever saying a true “I Can”. This is further made evident when he outlines that he structures his “year-off” daily routine in the same manner in which he operates at work (setting aside specific time brackets for idea generation, reflection and actually producing work). Rather than embracing latency fully, the “time-off” period is still completely focused

on performance with resultant outcomes, it is just in a freer environment. It is however an interesting example of somebody stopping their performative cycle to assess the ways in which their surplus energies can be harnessed or used in a different manner than that immediately requested of them. It is also worth noting that Sagmeister recognises that it is his creative energies which are his currency, and that witholding this does not devalue this currency for future transacitons.

Maurizio Lazzarato, ‘The Concepts of Life and the Living in the Societies of Control’ in Martin Fuglsang and Bent Meier Sorensen, eds. Deleuze and the Social, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006.

The Dividual Deleuze clearly sets out in his chapter “Postscript on Control Societies”

9

from the book (Negotiations) the gradual shifts from a sovereign society to a disciplinary society, and then to a society of control. The shift from a sovereign society to that of localized confinements, where previously those in power were “taking a cut of production instead of organizing it, condemning to death instead of ordering life”, has now lead to a society in which these strongholds of control are breaking down and de-localizing.

The apparatuses of control, seen most clearly in institutions such as prisons, schools and hospitals, also include seemingly more open realms such as the family and language, along with its representations such as literature, media and the arts. Deleuze explains that although these sites of confinement have a “common logic” we are expected to move from one to the other, from the family to school, perhaps higher education, then to the workplace, and “start all over again each time”. Within a control society these distinctions are broken down so that “you never finish anything”, with distinctions beween the interests of business, family, education and the individual coexisting in constantly shifting influences of control.

Disciplinary societies operate parodoxically in a space where it is possible to define both the individual and simultaneously the greater mass they are a part of. You are branded individually yet through this act are categorized and confined within the larger disciplinary system. Deleuze explains that in a control society however the individual becomes a “dividual”, where certain parcels of information which combine to define us “become samples, data, markets or ‘banks’ “, which can be traded, accessed and utilized by the varying power bases. This is in line with the development of capitalism from a system of selling products to selling services and performances.

Within this system power does not explicitly operate from the top down, with the state or private power the tip of a hierachy over the workplace and spaces of production, but rather operates in “transmutable or transformable coded configurations of a single business where the only people left are administrators”.

We start to see examples that we are living in a control society through the use of electronic tagging of criminal offenders to control movement beyond a localized power centre (ie the prison), through the idea of lifelong learning and “continuous assessment” in education, and new modes of business which operate outside of the “factory system”. Deleuze believes that whilst we cannot operate outside of power relations, we must be aware that new control strategies are being implemented, and that with this awareness we can start to discover possibilities of resistance. Deleuze questions the desire of the young generations to be “motivated” without a clear understanding of where this activity ultimately get you, and who in fact our struggle benefits.

Certain parcels of information which combine to define us “become samples, data, markets or ‘banks’”, which can be traded, accessed and utilized

10

Reinhold Martin, The Organisational Complex: Architecture, Media, and Corporate Space, Cambridge Massachusetts: MIT Press, 2003.

Signatures and In The Organizational Complex Reinhold Martin describes architecture as an system of spaces and subjects which were utilized by corporations Passwords active in the post-war period as a reduction of their “corporate image”. Martin states that within this specific techno-political era the subject was defined primarily as a consumer. This occurred through mass-production of interchangeable elements whereby the individual differentiated themselves through the choice of infinite variables and possibilities of ‘things’.

Martin is interested in how ideas surrounding the modular (and those of Modernism) with their inherent overarching controlling order, begin to represent not corporate authority and their embodied symbolism but rather a much larger decentralised system in which power is embedd in innumerable “microphysical protocols”. These become regulatory systems as described by Deleuze in Postscript on Societies of Control’ and become examples of the emerging “control societies”.

Within the change from disciplionary societies to societies of control the “mark of the individual” is reduced from a signature to a password which protects the subsets of data information of our lives. It is interesting to note that Facebook has recently come under scrutiny with the implementation of a new user interface which more openly tracks and visualises users activity on the site. The media around this has led to reports of similarities between the ‘new’ Facebook and Bentham’s panopticon model, with commentators writing “that real-time sharing means we always feel like we’re being watched and this then influences our behaviour” (The Age, 26/09/11. http://www.theage.com.au/technology/technology-news/ facebook-tracks-you-even-after-logging-out-20110926-1ksfk.html). Martin would argue that these networks of control have been evident from the post-war period, in the structuring of both communication (ephemeral) infrastructures alongside the physical, however it is interesting to note that this dialogue is clearly still relevant. Whilst changes to the Facebook interface merely highlight activity that was already occurring before, it does question whether Facebook is intentionally leading users to become more and more relaxed within the ‘organizational complex’, and then shifting levels of privacy without proper consent from individuals.

If individuals are defined by their subsets of data - how strong is your password? Do you exist if you delete your data?

11

Michel Foucault, ‘Preface’, in The Order of Things, London: Routledge, 1970.

Stratification of Knowledge

Foucault states in the foreward to the English edition of The Order of Things that the book is an attempt to study a period of history (the seventeenth to the nineteenth century) across a range of knowledge bases seen normally to be seperate or dissimilar. Whilst not trying to represent a comprehensive world view of the period through his investigation, he states comparison between these differing knowledge bases begins to shift commonly held emphases. Foucault believes that a comparative investigation begins to make clear a “network of analogies that transcended the traditional proximities”, highlighting similarites of thought across the various disciplines. This begins to reveal a “postive unconscious” - a layer of knowledge which operates under or beyond an individuals thought but which influences the generation of ideas and theories. Rather than doing this to describe the basis of the modern sciences, Foucault states that he aimed to depict “an epistemological space specific to a particular period”.

Using a passage from one of Borges’ writings, Foucault asks the reader to question the categories and containers in which we order knowledge.

Provocatively listing a series of contradictory and confusing categories in which to order animals, Borges highlights through the use of an alphabetical ordering system a disconnect between the stories sytem of categorisation and the readers. The seemingly logical ordering of the categories with letters blurs the boundaries of what we consider possible and highlights the importance of language as an ordering device. Foucault argues that whilst language allows us to order knowledge, juxtaposing and comparing ideas or objects, it is also a “non-place” - siteless.

Order is described as being the “inner law” of things whilst simultaneously being that which exists only once enounciated - “that which has no existence except in the grid created by a glance, an examination, a language”. In this way Foucault sets up a stratification of knowledge, whereby the solid base is made of an understanding that “order exists”, that things can be ordered, in accordance with an “inner law”. On top of this is the “middle region”, where order in its primary state is used as a basis in which “general theories as to the ordering of things, and the interpretation that such ordering involces, will be constructed”. This is the area of most interest to Foucault and he sees this as the “pure experience of order”. On top of this is then layered the “reflexive knowledge”, which is an attempt to respond to the shifting expressions of the middle layer and give it “explicit form”. Foucault believes that it is only through the study of the pure order, through analysis of ways “our culture has made manifest the existence of order” that a period’s true epistemological space can be described.

REFLEXIVE KNOWLEDGE INTERPRETATION & CONSTRUCTION OF ORDER

ORDERING CODES

TIME

Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg ‘An Inventory of Shimmers’ in Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg eds. The Affect Theory Reader, Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010.

Shimmering Reading Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg’s introductory chapter ‘An of Shimmers’ to The Affect Theory Reader I was struck with the Blooms Inventory realisation that collecting and collating knowledge (ie. the act of learning)

12

always leads me to the inverse feeling that I in fact know nothing. The deeper you delve into knowledge bases, the stronger you feel a sense of “freefall” (as described by Seigworth and Gregg) as previously collected ideas stretch, condense, amalgamate and seperate. This fall down the rabbit hole captures a moment of “becoming”, where we confront the ‘yetness’ of Spinoza’s statement “No one has yet determined what the body can do”. Suddenly, the promise of something new expands (or similarly contracts) our world view. Massumi, as previously discussed in the entry on his chapter “The Autonomy of Effect” (2002) calls this a “shock” which facilitates affect. When we are exposed (through reading/listening/ experiencing) another individual’s ideas or thoughts we receive an insight into that persons unique knowledge contours or personal affective ripples, which forces us to critically compare this with our own.

Massumi advocates that we pursue this feeling of perpetual becoming, to acknowledge the familiarity of this feeling, so that “our most familiar modes of inquiry [begin] with movement rather than stasis, with process underway rather than position taken”. The result of this lies in the possibilities. Preferencing the plural over the singular allows us to look where we might otherwise choose not too, to explore that which we didn’t know existed. This cosmopolitical outlook, where the Other is equal not equivalent (from Stengers “Cosmpolitical Proposal”, 2005) allows the individual to “[cast] its lot with the infinitely connectable, impersonal, and contagious belonging to this world”. Or in Isabelle Stengers words, make evident a “wordly world, a world where we, our ideas and power relations, are not alone, were never alone, will never be alone” (2007).

Within this forward thinking “bloom-space” it is tempting to believe that affect will bring about a newness that is always better. Seigworth and Gregg remind us that what comes next can in fact be worse. However, the qualities of affect suggest that if we feel we are freefalling, we can (and must) acknowledge that we are all freefalling together.