J.S. Hutta “The affective life of semiotics”

Hutta, J.S. 2015. The affective life of semiotics. Geographica Helvetica 70: 295–309.

Crucially, Guattari’s understanding of polysemiosis troubles the semiotics-as-capture axiom by disrupting the verticalist model, where affective expression is chiefly about visceral sensations that are being “coded”, “amplified”, “modulated”, “translated”, etc. Instead, Guattari distinguishes between “sensory” and “problematic” affects. Sensory affects subsist within particular forms of expression, such as the intonation of an actor that “will fix the melodramatic turn of an action” (Guattari, 1996:164). Such affects emerge from material components (expression-substances) conceived by the senses “as being immediately there” (ibid.: 160). This notion of sensory affect speaks to the non-representational interest

in material processes of affecting and being affected. At the same time, however, sensory affects are not opposed to semiotics, but rather integral to semiotic dynamism, as will be further elaborated below.

The role of semiotics is even more obvious in the case of problematic affects. Where sensory affects subsist within expressions, problematic affects emerge from the complex contents evoked and shaped by these expressions: “For example, the leitmotifs of the Rheingold will induce in me countless sentimental, mythical, historical, and social references, or, the evocation of some humanitarian problematic will trigger a complex feeling of repulsion, revolt, and compassion” (p. 160). Again, this conception of content-related affect will be fleshed out in more detail later on. What is important here is that affects are conjured through the planes of both expression and contents: through “sensory” forms of expression like an intonation as well as through “problematic” content-substances like the references evoked by a musical motif. (299)

What is more, rather than positing the sensory as privileged site of affect, Guattari considers problematic affects to be “at the basis of sensory affects”; they are “affect in its ‘rich’ version” (1996:161). It is the dynamism conjured through semiotic content-substances that is thus first and foremost generative of affective life in Guattari’s view. (300)

Poetic language is affective in the two senses of the expression of affect and the affectivity of expressions. Firstly, constellating meanings, memories and images as well as sounds and rhythms, poetic language conjures and reworks the problematic and sensory affects subsisting within them. This is a process of poetically expressing affect. This process, secondly, renders poetic expression affective, thus impacting on the constitution of experience and subject formation. (300)

Locating the poetic image within a more-than-signifying dimension, however, Bachelard at the same time regards it as emerging from language. A kind of “force” driving poetic creation thus seems to be at work within language itself.20 And this generative force can be seen as constitutive of poetry’s generative capacities regarding subjectivities: “[The image] becomes a new being in our language, expressing us by making us what it expresses; in other words, it is at once a becoming of expression, and a becoming of our being. Here expression creates being.” (The Poetics of Space, 1994: p. xxiii). (302)

Rather than originating in stimuli impinging on the physical body, then, affective intensities conjure and work semiotic contents as part of dynamic and heterogeneous semiotic regimes. A further conceptual readjustment is in order here. For what actually drives centripetal and centrifugal dynamics is their expressive enactment, the actual enunciation, or “utterance” in linguistic expressions: “Every concrete utterance of a speaking subject serves as a point where centrifugal as well as centripetal forces are brought to bear”, says Bakhtin (The Dialogic Imagination, 1981:272). (304)

Affect is thus a latent tendency – a “dis-position of enunciation”, as Guattari (p. 160) puts it. It is expressed, however, not despite semiotics, but in taking semiotic enunciation as its positive condition of effectivity. Affects, in other words, are not just circumstantially associated with contents and expressions; they rather subsist within them. While they are conjured along with evoked contents, they simultaneously drive the relational constitution of these contents. (304)

The repetition and variation of expressive components, or refrains, in bird songs as well as in paintings or pieces of music, they argue, constitutes affectively intense “territories”. (306)

Affects, I have argued, “subsist” as virtual tendencies within semiotic contents and expressions. These virtual tendencies are actualised in concrete expressive enactments, thus conjuring problematic and sensory affects. Affect can consequentially be viewed as simultaneously driving expression and emerging from it; as virtual affects are expressed (“expression of affect”), expressions become affective (“affectivity of expression”). (307)