Beyond Representation?

1. Beyond Representation? Massumi on Terrorism and Natural Disaster

2. Fear (The Spectrum Said) • Media ecology als politiek: hoe grijpt politiek in ons leven? • Hoe werkt angst? • Onderscheid lichaam – taal.

3. Societies of Control • Logic: • Individu = dividu. Massa = markt, sample. • Code, toegang tot informatie. • Schuld. • ‘Man is nolonger man enclosed, but man in debt’ • Kritiek moet anders. • Kunst. • Post-modernisme. • Activisme /Occupy. • Nieuwe ideologie versus nieuwe sensibiliteit/affecten?

4. Fear (The Spectrum Said)

5. Fear (The Spectrum Said) There was simply nothing to identify with or imitate. The alerts presented no form, ideological or ideational and, remaining vague as to the source, nature and location of the threat, bore precious little content. They were signals without signification. All they distinctly offered was an “activating contour”: a variation in intensity of feeling over time. They addressed not subjects’ cognition, but rather bodies’ irritability. (p.32)

6. No representation, what is happening? It was less a communication than an assisted germination of potentials for action whose outcome could not be accurately determined in advance – but whose variable determination could be determined to occur, on hue. (p.33)

7. Feeling • ‘A political uncertainity principle is pragmatically established. It practically acknowledges that the systemic environment within which power mechanisms function is metastable, meaning provisionally stagle but excitable, in a state of balalnce but ready to jog.’ • ‘The threat as such is nothing yet – just looming’. • Threat is the future case of a change in the present’.

8. Feeling • ‘Threat is a futurity with a virtual power to affect the present quasicausally.’ • Threat is the cause of fear in the sense that it triggers and conditions fear’s occurence, but without the fear it effects, the threat would have no handle on actual existence, remaining purely virtual. (36).

9. Feeling • James: Fear strikes the body and compels it to action before it registers consciously. • ‘We don’t run because we are (consciously) afraid, we feel afraid because we run’. (36). • The fear is a dynamic ingathering of action assuring the continuity of its serial unfolding and moving the reality of the situation, which is its activation, down the line of fright. The experience is in the fear, in its ingathering of action, rather than the fear being the content of an experience. (37).

10. Thought • If the event is recounted, the narrative will place the objective unfolding of the occurrence on a parallel track with its subjective registering… • The personal history of the narrating body will have to negotiate this duality, presenting a public face allied with the content, defined as objective, in contradistinction to the subjective content, defined as private. (39).

11. Ontsnapping? • ‘Having fear as a subjective content against the background of fear revirtual becomes a way of life.’ (41) • Viscious circle. • Ontsnapping: • Analsye van de werking (inzicht) of constructie van nieuwe affecten? • Onderdrukking of transformatie?

12. Ontsnapping? • For action and emotion to be in resonance with each other, there must be a superior individual that encompasses them: this individuation is that of the collective. (Simondon) • Grand narratives vs. small narratives? (Lyotard). • Volgende les.