What is an Affect-Place?

What is an Affect-Place?

Local Localized

What if ,with our present position, we attempt to move from a subjective interpretation of an image to the image in itself, to move from anthropocentric signifiers to an actual an-origin of the real panorama? What if we attempt to move from the subject to a multiplicity of actors? What if we turn the act, the action as a Plato’s demiurgic creation, to the affect as a morphogenetic algorithm of actual series? What if we go back from the absolute ( ab-solutus, which means “loosened from”, “unattached”) space to the determination of a topological local plane?

The aim of the first part of the paper is to move from the common focus point Image-Subject-Interpretation to the Image-in-itself, and showing how this argument concerns on one side the open-ended image directions, and on the other side the

actual origin of the real.

What is an open image? How an image is established? What if there are not singular images, but sequences of infinite and indefinite images? What if there are not images, but kaleidoscopic sequences of divergent actual series ? What is an open sequence of images and where the sequence of images take place? What is a nomad sequence?

If we think about the act, the action, what concerns an act is a relation between

Figure in the space III.

subjects. It concerns the production or the happening of something new from something else. But an action over an anthropocentric position goes beyond and behind a subject vanishing point. An act that envolves not just subjects but a multiplicity of actors , no matter if these are subjects, objects, organic organisms or inorganic aggregations, attempts to go over a perspective position, in order to approach a relational reality. Population of actors as a city, an ants’ nest, a clot of sedimentary stones, the linkage of high and low pressure air masses, are relational aggregation of individual singularities. This non-perspective but relational position achieves the issue that reality is non-just-anthropocentric, but it is real, objective in itself, subsisting and existing in itself.

This subsisting real reality is exactly what is represented in an image. The subsisting real is actual: it is the actualized ants’ nest in each part of its movement and relational aggregation, from the queen ant to the humid cells in which fungus grow.

Sign, inside, repetition.

So it’s possible to say that the actual origin of the real, beyond any interpretation of any image, is the necessity that allows interpretations to come out.

The interpretation that is produce after the image is mono-directional.

A mono-direction interpretation presupposes a subjective point of view, a univocal and close interpretation, through a language’s media, about something. This mono-diretional movement is univocal because of the direct relation between image-subject. So the mono-directionality deals with the subjects: it’s the moment in which the subject (human, bacteria, animal, etc. ) interprets, it’s the moment in

which the subject chooses a meaning. Precisly, it’s moment in which the subject understands-translates the actual real using its subjectivity, inter-subjectivity, and its logic of assemblage.

Anylizing further, those are the exact moments in which the subject is asked to say something, to think something using its language condition and pre-condition.

But we don’t want you to say something, we are not interested in that. We don’t need you to say something to or for someone else.

What we want to achieve here is to go beyond the language pre-condition, is to go beyond the singular image and reaching a open sequence of images.

So a mono-directional image is in opposition to an image in itself, namely an open and wide image. It is an image without an anthropocentric panorama: it is an image without a subjective signifier. And so an image-in-itself is a multi-directional image in the exact moment before an interpretation or a representation.

If some actors are in a infinite close corridor with just one door, each actor sooner or later will enter the door; at first the actors will wander trying to reach the door (the attractor), and after a while, inevitably the door will be opened, and the corridor will be empty. So we can suppoes that the actors will not be anymore in the infinite-close corridor, but in other places. Instead, if a crowd of actors is in a infinite corridor with infinite door, and each of these door is connected/connects to another door, there is a point arguing and showing how each actor will enter one door, and how will they wander through the corridor.

We can say that in the first case there will be a directional ordering movement in the corridor, in order to go through the gate. In the second one there will be a non-directional order in the corridor: there will be an infinite series, convergent

Rouge.

and divergent, of movement in order to go through a gate. Defining what is a non-directional order we could use the term multi-directional: a multi-directional movement is a complex assemblage of inifite and open directions, . Within this panorma there isn’t anymore a reason to talk about the image in itself, because the single image is becoming, slowly, a sequence of images, and the sequence is becoming a sequence of sequences. A singular image becomes a clot, an assemblage of situation’s sequences.

Something is in a corridor; there is a labyrithic serie of rooms crossing a narrow passage, one after another; some rooms have doors, but these are all laying on the ground or standing as impermanet figure; overthere is a way out of here, it’s green, it’s safe. Everything is messed up, papers, chips of books and glasses, log-notes with names, numbers and indexes; somewhere and everywhere blood, as if you enter in a slaughterhouse, that one in which your favorite butcher goes morning after mornig holding a knive. Off the musty wall a blurred red line is almost straight, just a few loose drops are out of the path. Some people wander in this noisy and rough place. Don’t clatter, it could be dangerous. The air is stuck.

Somewhere there is repetitive and heavy sound beat. Don’t walk here, don’t hurt yourself. The floor is watered by a deep red. But there are trees outside, how could it be un-homely? It’s safe; it’s home. “ Rouge ” is the actualized process that we are trying to define. In itself “ Rouge” is an image, but not-just an image: it’s an open serie of images. Because of the assemblage of many images, whitin an ambient-situation, “Rouge” becomes an indefinite multi-directional sequence in which the meaning is lost, in which any mono-directional movement has to face the multi-directional series of interpretations that it suggests. The movements inside the sequence, of both the image and the nomadic actors inside the image, are poli-lateral. Both of they are wandering within a poli-lateral place generated by those corridors, rooms, and doors that are evelopping and developing. To open a door in a poli-lateral sequence it means to be opened to another room. This envelope is flattened and it is indefinite. Each actor subsists in the same multi-directional and poli-lateral serie of actual envelopes.

Defining the open multi-directional (poli-lateral) image, we have to move to the relation bewteen the image and its actual origin of the real. This actual origin is what establishes the image.

The actual origin of the real could be set as the actual an-original reality, the an-origin of the real.

Red I - The Smooth Haptic Triptic

If we talk about an origin, it seems that we have to go gack and try to re-establish what has been lost: where is the origin of the real? Is there somewhere a first real that is more real than this one, that is more real then the open poli-lateral sequence of real? This is an aporia. It’s a repetitive argument in itself, in which each part deny the other. It’s as if we want to trace all the movements that the actor did

in the vast and indefinite corridor, and finding the first one, the most true, ora what we assume as “the Movement”. Is that possible? is there any meaning? There is no longer a first, more true than other, reality, or an origin of reality, or a more true origin of language, but just a rhizome of singular and individual realities. All of these multiple realities are related each other by being actual. And they are also related in their virtual actuality. This means to say that their relational aggregation is a relation between possibilities, between infinite multiplicity of singularities.

There is no procedure to trace the most true ring of the chain, or the original one, because the chain is actual, because there isn’t what we are looking for. The chain is composed of divergent and convergent infinite series of relations between a multiplicity of possibilities. We just need to think about the corridor with inifinte doors: the corridor is narrow and indefinite, the doors are infinite and the doors are connected and connects to each other. That place is a delirious and claustrophobic place, everything is condensed in a point. Everything is in a point: it’s a pinpoint!

Everything is actual or virtual (what isn’t yet actual ), the continuous re-assemblage of multiplicities is there. There isn’t an emergency door with safe stairs.

But, it’s still possible to trace the consistency of this chain image. It’s still possible to trace the consistency of each relational door.

Cycle.

If there is a pair of shoes on the ground probably everyone could see them, and no one could deny that they subsist. Even if someone is blind he-she-it can still touch the pair of shoes, and also a worm, even if it doesn’t know what a pair of shoes is, or what fabric and plastic are, it will recognize that there is indeed something on its path, therefore it will have to climb or bypass it. If there is no longer a pair of shoes on the ground then it will be impossible to have an image ( open, poli-lateral, non-directional image) of that pair of shoes; even if the shoes still will be, will subsist somewhere, but not there. Therefore, also the interpretation will not be possible.

Indeed we are allowed to say that a singular intense reality is necessary to produce an image, to generate an interpretation. And this image, coming from a singular reality, it’s a image made of intensity, density, forces, tension, pressure. Those are intensive properties of a singular reality, and they work, produce and express towards differences. Differences in pressure, density and forces produce movement.

Through the differences and the repetitions of organic and inorganic pattern, we can deconstruct the intense real. Thus, we can say that a sequence is intense, and still, this intensivness remains throughout the movement from the actual real to the ocean of interpretations. It remains as a sensation-perception: a poli-lateral and multi-directional intense sensation.

The actual an-origin of the real thought line doesn’t focus on an image, on a arbitrary interpretation and deformation of an image, that deal with subjectivity

and inter-subjectivity. It focuses on the exact moment before. The exact moment before becoming extensive. The exact moment before becoming a thousand of mono-directional different images. The exact moment in which the image is just an image-in-itself, a clot of intensiveness, still linked with the actual an-origin of the real. A clot of intesiveness is the actualized reality , a plane of consistency in itself ( before the language ).

As we said, it’s an aporia to put our thought in a kaleidoscopic chain of possible intense reality, looking for the most original ring of the language’s chain, but it’s still possible to grasp the actual plane of consistency of the real. Thus, the process focuses on the exact moment in which the image is produced and is still wide, poli-lateral, non-directional, approaching an infinite series of consistent possibilities and actualizations.

Therefore there is no need for a subjective signifier, but instead of this, there are actually multiplicity of vessels of meanings, of possibilities, of infinite divergent or convergent series of possibilities of meaning ( in a subjective ocean of interpretations ).

From the interpretation point of view, everything is an interpretation, there are no facts, everything is a sprawl of subjectivity and inter-subjectivity. And this is of course the truth, but on the other side it is not the subject (human) who creates the

Corpse-Objekt-Rizhoma.

Real; the subject is just a clot of actual represented reality. But outside of it, there is still something, there is still the real, there is still something to grasp. Therefore, from this actual-materialistic (new realism) approach, the act could be considered as an affect.

This is what concern an act-action : “what is left over if I substract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that i raised my arm?”.

An act is subjective, it is cause by agent’s desires, beliefes and behaviors in different situations. And it concern also the relation between the real-subject: “how can I say that the chair that I think to see it’s what I believe to see?”

An act-action, from this perpective, is a deconstruction of possible senses and relations of something that is going to happen. An act with significant and signifier, a sign; a reflective act in a deconstructive process ( trying to answer questions as “what”?, “how?”, “when?” and “where?”.

On the other hand the affect is, from the subject point of view, the relation be-

tween a spacial experience (intensive spacing) and the bodily expression ( an intense sensuous body).

So an affect, from an actor point of view, is the capacity to affect and be affected; this presupposes that the affect implies something that is capable to act-react and something that is capable to be acted-reacted. What is the capability? A knife can cut, but it can also threat, but it could also not cut, if it isn’t sharp. A knife can be used to intimidate or stick something on the wall. It could also do nothing and remaining in the drawer.

All of these are virtual capabilities of the knife. They are virtual because they are still not actual, but it doen’t means that they could occur in a specific instant.

Those infinite series of possibilites relate to “ how the knife works” and “what the knife can do” are the capacities of the knife.

An affect, to be actual, it needs capacities, actors and it needs individual singularities.

The necessity for an event to happen, for a affect to be generated are capacities and actors.

Within this line of thought there is no distinction between the active and passive form of language. Capacities are not passive or active. If your arm can be cut by a knife is not because your arm it’s done to be cutted by that knife. Your arm is softer than the blade’s knife, the blade is harder then the flesh: the interaction of these intensive capacities produce the affect “you have a cut on your arm”.

There isn’t a hierarchical order of the active and passive actors, but they have to be considered as in motion from active to passive and from passive to active. Thus, the actors are situated on the same flat level, in the same ambient. The affect goes beyond the representation and focuses on the embodied experience.

So the affect is relational, it implies relations, the relation between actors ( anything), between singularities, between individuals, between multiplicity.

Analysing further what leads from an act to an affect, the non-hierarchical scale of relation, the non-passive-active relation in the affect generate the necessity, from both sides, of activity. That means that the two, or the multiplicity of the side, has to react to a first trigging event. The multiplicity react to differences, producing intrinsic variability, generating the generativity, producing morphogenetic changes.

If the first part of this text was analysing “what” the act-affect is and “how” it subsists, the other question that has to be answered is “where”. Where does the act-affect take place. Naturally, it take place in a place, a local place. But what it means local? what is a place?

The local that we are thinking about is a re-territorialization from a deterritorialized subjective absolute. Re-territorialization means the process through which contextualizes set of relations are territorialized again. Or what if we could say: what if a contextualize set of relations have never been de-territorialized?

A subjective absolute is a reference grid; a general abstraction for generalized populations of local situations. We have never been in an absolute representative grid, instead we are in a topological real local: we are nomadic actualized clot of reality, wandering in a topological local plane. We have never been de-territorialized, as we have never been modern. We have always been an immanent appropration and occupation of localized locals.

The main quality and attribute of a local plane is its actuality, so its origin of the real : it is actual in that specific instant and it is in a continuous in-becoming.

We can say that a local place is an immanent plane of consistency. Therefore we are allowed to say that the local-place subsist as a “situational logic” or “logic of events”, as a logic of relational actors, which is expressed through a logic of intense sensation-affection.

What does is means logic in context? Logic is the continuous in-becoming assemblage and re-assemblage of actors. Logic is an implication, a relational implication of intense actors. So the local-place is a specific ecologic happening, that subsists in a range of time and that subsists as a relational ambient, as a flat background texture of relational real things. But “what� is a flat background and a texture of relational real things? In any place, that is defined as local , what subsists and moves in it are objects, things, organic or inorganic, permanents or non-permanents. We will say of a pure immanence, a pure territorialized local plane, that is a life, and nothing else. A life is a specific impersonal and indefinite life discovered in the real singularity of events. A life is subjectless, it is indivduation and stratification. A life is everywhere, an immanet life carrying with it events and singularities, that are actualized in subjects and objects (actors).

These actors ( including any type of possible actors ) and populations of actors are articulators or localizers.

A localizer is the manifestations of differences in standard ambients , so it means that it is the increase of local in-variation of a more generalized-global pattern.

We could define localizers as the hyper local immanence, the hyper local distortion of the grid. The crease in the local, the hyper refusal of the general-global subjective absolute, for a subjectiveless envelope.

Throughout the act-affect, articulators-localizers and basically their relation, their assemblage and re-assemblage, the place is placed and the local is localized.

Yellow I - Topological Envelop Superimposition

The Virtual Condensed

Sealed in three cilindrical tubes of cardboard, there are three virtual Affect-Place.

On each tube there is a label that says: Affects-Place I , Topological Envelope, “It contains 120m of white polyethylene rope, with infinite possibilities”.

Affects - Place II , Intensivness - Extensivness, “it contains 100, per 0,5m, iron non-galvanized wires, with virtual multiplicities and capacities”.

Affects - Place III , Morphogenesis Consistency , “it contains 250g of orange smoke signal, type and mechanism 16819 and 16820, with a plane of in-expansion consistency”.

�

Black I Topological Envelope Superimposition Black II - Topological Envelope Triptic

Topological Envelope, the envelope of the rope

What if an abstract line becomes real ? What if parallels and meridians that grid the Earth became the real topologic geoid of the planet ? What if we deconstruct the form, the rational, functional and programmatic boxes from the consistency and the individual in itself ? What if the local, the place, will not be deterritorialized but topologically territorialized ( which means to abandon the general, abstract and absolute, measurements, a random and anthropo(s)centric subjectivness, but to go back facing and spacing a real and intense description of local place)? What if there is no space, but just a local plane/place, local tendencies, planes-strata consistencies, local forces that interact and generate a topological haptic place in which the nomadism/monadism of singular objects and people, organic and in-organic, appears?

The rope envelopes and developes as a reaction to the ground, a reaction to and against the space: this is what is called an affection. The capacity to affect and be affected through out relations, assemblages of capacities. “Topological envelope “ relates the capacity of the rope to be bended and the quality to be affected by the gravity, and the capacity of the ground to be solid, to be dense. The space, or better the place, is no longer forced into a defined and ordering grid, but the grid is a warped and enveloped grid. There is a crease in the grid. The grid is no longer the space for distances. This grid is no longer a static, rigid and repetitive absolute system, but a clot of relative complex systems, a network of relation: the differences in the repetition of a non-static , but intrinsic variable, grid generate the place in itself, the fluctuation of the place. The grid is deformed, the horizon in bent by intensities and forces, by dense actual masses.

To measure a line ,in and to itself, means to choose some points, try to take their positions in an absolute space through absolute and extensive measurements, in order to have a grid setting that could locate that specific points. Using this approach to “the Real Things” we are not even close to the real object, to the place, to the articulators and the localizer in themselves. The plane still remais absolute, not immanent. This is a static dimension of thinking, in which everything is fixed, everything has coordinates (and to have coordinates it means to have just two or three allowed movements to locate something), and the objects that we want to point out are empty objects in an empty, abstract and rigid grid. The opposite thought to the previous one is : not collecting points, but to describe their inter-relations. Describing the tendencies, describing the range of change between different points, the infinite series of relations between points, their assemblage, in order to describe the movement of a complex system of actors, constantly engaging a network of relations, in order to approach a place, an ambient, or just the movement of the ground. In opposition to the static thought, this has a dynamic dimension in itself: it is a dynamic and intense thought. And basically, it focuses on the continuous assemblages in-between parts, between actors, that freely move and wander into an actual place, into an in-motion Lacanian grid.

Yellow II - Topological Envelope Triptic

Intensiveness/Extensiveness

One-hundred iron wires are placed around the edge of and in two tidal pools, bended and enveloped following the ground’s, water’s and other object’s movements. The wires envelop and develop as a reaction to the place, so they generate the non-hierarchical scale of relation, but farther than this, the wire are also affected ( and affects) by the algaes, the oxygen, the water, the nitrogen, the pressure, the speed of the wind. So they produce rust during oxidation processes, contribute to a place where algae can grow, where humidity can condenses ( the vapour passes through critic points and densifies itself into a drop of water). Critical points are those specific trigging events, from which a difference is generated, from which, morphogenetic changes are produced. When there is enough energy the water, at 100° C, begins to boils: its consistency it’s changed, the aggregations of molecules

is changed, the convection starts, all of these are morphogenetic singularities.

The shape of the wires, in this variation of the envelope of the rope, is not just describing topologically a multiple reality, but it also generates in-becoming variations, it generates a-life : the in-organics and the organics processes appear, or better, happen after trigging events, critical points. The virtual segmentary series of the rhizome is actualized, it has developed its strata consistency.

What is close is the smooth space, it is the local ambient panorama, it’s what is haptical. The striated space is what is distant, is the generalized and ordered patter, texture, background, it’s what becomes optical to a subject. The smooth space is an envelope of close and haptic vision , everything is becoming bended, distorted and flattened in this vision. The space will become flat because of its density, because it is composed by elements, strata of elements and their consistency: this kaleidoscopic “densivness”, a local density of information and of Real Things, will be translated in flat reality just because of our position in a specific strata. On the other hand we can say that the haptic function and the close vision presuppose the smooth space. It presuppose no background or contours, but rather changes in direction and local linkages between parts. The dense aerial haptic space consitutes the unlimited site of intersection of planes. The description of this close space is topological , it is a description of qualities and intensity. This space has an intrinsic variation, it is an in-variation space, in-motion nomad non-place (non-place because of in the net-work of this Big-Data in-relation, of this wide assemblage of everything, the local place will dissolve itself in something more complex, articulated and wide-wild). The transformational movement, that produce actuals inter-action between iron, algaes ,oxygen, nitrogen, organisms, is generated by differences in intensities. Therefore, the device, the act-space/affect-place and the iron, is producing relation, relational interactivities through differences and intensities, it is producing fluxuses, variations: it is generating individual singularities. The relational interaction-interconnection in a place works on a haptic strata (layer) space, an enveloped and bended space, in which there is no difference between organic and inorganic, but there is just a whole flat movement that creates an assemblage, in a continuous re-assemblage.

Red II - Extensiveness/Intensiveness Triptic

Segmentary Rizhome figure in a flat plane.

Morphogenetic Consistency

Why not to talk about organic or inorganic, why not to talk about gender? A morphogenetic change, morphogenesis of changes in individuals, don’t deal with and will go beyond those statements. Once an individual, or an actor, is defined through processes of individuations, there is no point separating them into categories, into groups. What does matter is the ecologic ambient in which those are located. What does matter is the event through which each of those parts begin to dissolve. Bodies, individuals, places will begin to be dissolved, will begin to be nomad wandering events, nomad bodies.

The smoke-cloud signal fires in the deserted land of the island, wide and indefinite (indeterminate) zone, as if it is “The Zone” of “Stalker”, in which there are

uncountable tidal pools that make the space smooth, that bend the place and the land, that make the place-plane haptic. The smoke-cloud at first releases ither-him-self, then the expansion starts. It expands in relation to the density and it moves in relation to external forces. This is relational, this the nomadic relational in expansion. The cloud continues to expand until it is dissolved. But even after that, when the cloud will stop to be a cloud, its-her-his parts will continue to wander in the place, to other places. The cloud continues to move, to wander, looking for singularity point of equilibrium, where the continuous heterogeneous is in-becoming homogeneous. The cloud-smoke dissolves in the place, and the place is dissolved in the cloud and so the body, the object, the organs, the in-organic. The real becomes a rizhome, a dense actual clot, developing its segmentary divergent series through its expansion. The plane of consistency of multiplicity is condensing and in-becoming. Now just a condensed flat background subsists, just an intense relational clot subsists, in which we wander, in which we wander with our body, without organs, without being organic or inorganic.

What is faced during this process is a generative nomadism. It is a surface though of nomadism. The surface: facing the strata of the flattened dense located place.

The thought of nomadism, the nomad that is everywhere and nowhere, produce nomadic acts and affects; it occupies and appropriates the local-place and dissolves in it. Through out the iteration, the repetition of differences, this generate the difference en movement, therefore it’s allowed to name that as a generative nomadism, a morphogenerative process that condens a virtual into an actual body: the actualization of the body and the place.

The nomad thought lead to consider the monad in itself. Where does the nomad subjectiveless aim? Where is it leaning toward?

A monad, where a nomadic assemblage tends, is the substance, the real thing that is expressed in terms of independent action-affection. A monad is a pinpoint substance, it’s indeed a centre of forces, a singular centre of intense tendencies, of intense movements. A monad is a point of singularity. As a point of singularity, it is a attractor: the singularity to which the multiplicty tends. It’s a point of convenrgent tendecies.

In an ecologic local place there is an orange emergent cloud. Within this event the place is placed, the local is localized. The cloud is placed, and it is affected by rain, wind, humidity, density and pressure. The rain drops push the cloud down, the orange molecules are caught: will them be in the soil? The wind moves the cloud, but it’s not a directional movement: there is a point to which the cloud tends to go, but the path isn’t straight. The pressure and the density tend to dissolve the orange cloud, but the process is slow: it takes time in a multi-directional envelope.

It’s somewhere a point to which the event tends , a singular point within the topo-

Orange III - Morphogenesis Consistency sequence - triptic

logical place.

The monad happens, is shown, and as it’s said it is a pinpoint substance, an attractor , so the nomad actors wander in the haptic local-place looking for the pinpoint.

They over and over again condens and dissolve around the monad, occupy and appropriate the space, till everything is melted, a whole blurred clot of ephemeral consistency.

Orange II - Morphogenesis Consistency Haptic - Optic