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Reflections on Chp. 7 of The Affect Reader

An Ethics of Everyday Infinites and Powers Felix Guattari on Affect and the Refrain by Lone Bertelsen & Andrew Murphie

My curiosity over Felix Guattari’s connection to affect theory was the main inspiration for selecting this chapter for review. I had encountered Guattari while in a nonsensical argument with a former colleague and fellow Francophonian, who had the uncanny penchant for segues into cursory philosophical constructs, when the rational and simple eluded him.  At the time, he was trying to unravel a rhetorical quagmire, by evoking a convenient adaptation of Guattari’s elevation of the importance of subjectivity in determining truth. It was the first time I had ever heard of Guattari and my ignorance was fodder for his theoretical eloquence.

Therefore, when I perused the titles of all the chapters of The Affect Reader, none jumped at me but this one: I thought, at least I could assuage my ego from the negative register that it associated with Guattari; however, the time I reached the second page, I realized that this wasn’t going to be about simply expanding my limited knowledge of the renowned French psychoanalyst, philosopher, theorist, and social activist, but more profoundly, it was going to be my introduction to affect theory: another unfurling of ignorance. How ironic!   Doesn’t this iteration of visceral anxiety over knowledge point directly to the essence of affect itself, a sort of slippery, processual, indeterminate, negotiation and renegotiation of reality?

What Lone Bertelson and Andrew Murphie did in this chapter was blend Guattari’s “logic of affects” and his constitutive role of refrains in analyzing how a significant historical event reflected and epitomized political struggles over affective distribution. The event which the authors selected was the August 2001 maritime impasse in which the Australian Special Air Services troops seized a red Norwegian freighter, The Tampa, and arrested its captain, who had rescued from an overcrowded sinking boat 460 Afghan refugees desperately seeking asylum in Australia.  The incident triggered a relay of media, foreign relations, national security, and human rights discourses that exposed varied layers of powers, interests, and ideologies and looped a series of distinctive refrains.

Before undertaking their analysis, the authors were eager to offer disclosures of their conceptual perspectives and points of departure. For me, this very contextualization exemplified the praxis of affect theory within theorization. First they noted that they did not see refrain as a mere signifier but as a ‘molecular rupture’ of systems of signs. Furthermore, they do not view affective territories within the context of aggression; rather, they approach them as processes of expressions that keep falling apart, a transduction of forces rather than transmission of signs. They also adopted a tripartite framing of affect: affect as transitive, affect as personal and familiar, and affect as powerful through the Spinozan theory of affect that gives power to the body. Finally, they concur with Guattari in rejecting the conservative agenda that overuses affect in the restrictive sense of the “logic of delimited sets”.

After reading this section, I went back to chapter one of the text, An Inventory of Shimmers, to first understand their categorizations more clearly, and second to search for concordances and discordances with their approaches and that of Seigworth and Gregg. I internalized the comparable emphasis given to affect as a force: both overt and subtle, and affect as continuous and temporal.

Returning to Chapter 7, I noticed that Bertelsen and Murphie were actually making  some interesting observations of affective frameworks within the narratives of the 2001 conflict between The Tampa, and the Australian military, which they titled: A Red Ship on the Horizon. They dissected the impact of the event into three components: “the emergence of territory via the refrain, the emergence of new functions within this territory, and the further refraining of this new territory and new functions.” (p.142)

They concluded that The Tampa incident proved that affect is not form, but rather transitions between existences, with both actual and virtual dimensions. They argue that these transitions really take form through the effective workings of the refrain, manifested through temporal contours and resonances.  These refrains offer openings to change and new realities. The process engages the affective experience not simply as emotion or feeling but more accurately as ‘sensations and instincts’ (p.148). They present a synergistic association of affect and refrain through Guattari’s degree of composition, which differentiates the connections of affects and refrains into three categories: simple affects or simplest refrains, problematic affects or complex refrains, and hypercomplex refrains or hypercomplex problematic. According to Guattari these affects often unfold in a powerful mix in different processes of composition and decomposition (p.149).

For the authors, the story of the red ship supported Guittari’s conception of the dominance of subjective singularity in negotiating reality. Within an Australian dynamic, it was the “archaic attachments to cultural traditions, while for the Media, social activists, and politicians it was the redefinition of internationalism, international law, contrastingly, for the refugees it was an expression of survival, human rights, and self determination. While I absorbed how the formation of these divergent perspectives influenced understanding of the conflict, I could not help but reflect on the role of power and cultural value in the eventual outcome, uneasy of how notions of justice are constructed and ordered.

Guattari was equally troubled by such inequities, and within this interplay of dialectic forces, he elevates as fundamental the need for ethics and a value of “subjective pluralism” (p. 151). Guattari is nonetheless cynical about contemporary society’s approach to subjectivity, a phenomenon that he calls cultural neuroleptizing. He sees this most evidently demonstrated in the values inculcated by pedagogic practices: scientism and the aesthetic. For Guattari, holistic ethics must embrace the acceptance of the other, a symptom of subjective pluralism. This is the most authentic conception of a community, since communities are formed by common goals, interest, and states, but live and are sustained through variegated differences.

Conclusively, this chapter is one of the most insightful and poignant justifications of the importance of validating and incorporating the individual and subjective experience in the mediation of meaning and the interpretation of reality. I believe negating this organic process of attending to the world, is inadvertently devaluing and denigrating the richness of community. From an epistemological stance, the notion that affect is continually processsual, never static, but always in some metamorphic state suggests that conceptions of reality themselves are temporal and spatially limited, that what is known is never certain, or at least is only momentary.

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         Bertelsen, L., & Murphie, A. (2010). An Ethics of everyday infinities and powers: Felix Guattari on affect and the refrain. In (Eds.) M. Gregg & G. Seigworth. The affect theory reader (pp.138 – 157). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.