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10

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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