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cultural theories on the concept of affect emphasize its dynamic
propensity to move in and out of the body at the instigation of
environment. For affect theorists, the environment which bodies
encounter is constituted by, and permeated with, forces and
relations of force. By means of its encounters with these relations
of force, the body gains the capacity to affect, and to be affected, in
an open-ended in–betweenness. For Deleuze, affect “is a
prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one
experiential state of the body to another and implying an
augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act”
(Massumi, 1987: xvi). The significance of the Deleuzian body is
therefore predicated upon its interactions with other bodies: “A
body affects other bodies, or is affected by other bodies; it is this
capacity for affecting and being affected that also defines a body in
its individuality” (Deleuze, 1992, 625). The body is thus the
shifting passage for a performative subject, which acts to respond
to that which is outside of itself, be it another body, an intensity of
affect, or the environment. Affect moves and flows from one body
to another, disrupting the borders between self and other. Since
the body is “always already implicated by its milieu” (Gatens 2004,
115), affect
—
as a combination of feelings and emotions
—
is
animated by the body’s participation with its milieu. Therefore,
one cannot “be”, but only act in a permanent state of becoming.
The idea of becoming, however, stresses not only the body’s
capability to affect and be affected by force relations among bodies,
and encounters between the body and its environment. Becoming
also denotes
becoming otherwise
at the moment of affecting and
being affected. As Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg remark:
“affect is integral to a body’s perpetual
becoming
(always becoming
otherwise, however subtly, than what it already is), pulled beyond
its seeming surface-boundedness by way of its relation to, indeed
its composition through, the forces of encounter” (2010: 3;
emphasis in the original). The affective subject is thus a subject of
becoming, a subject yet to be produced in and through its