totality...which cannot be isolated in a particular movement or word
because it transcends these when taken as a fragment of the mundane (e.g.
the physical body). At the same time, it does not exist beyond the particulars
of the act because it is only through the specific engagements of embodied
people together that such symbolic realms are made to appear.
(Radley 1996: 569, emphasis in the original)This conception of embodiment is one, in other words, in which groups of actors
can conjure up virtual ‘as-if ’ worlds, by delineating a space-time in which some-
thing significant is to occur and, at the same time, ‘the actors are themselves
reconfigured in the light of the possibilities that flow from them’ (Radley 1996:
57 0). Thus embodiment both signals beyond the present and reworks the present
by exemplifying a totality rather than exactly specifying a class or category.^8
In evoking another bounded world, the actors conjure powers and meanings that
they despair of, which yet appear to derive from a location other than their
‘ordinary’ selves (this is the sense, when watching a dramatic scene, that the actors
are invigorated by passions or can draw upon powers that have their source beyond
the immediate setting or their physical capacities).
What the actors draw attention to is an ongoing rearrangement of objects
and symbols within a field involving the body. An attempt to convey the idea has
been set out previously in terms of the concepts of meta-communication (Bateson
197 3) and framing (Goffman 19 74 ). However, these concepts do not empha-
size sufficiently the crucial point that the ground of the display indicates itself;
it is self-referential. It is embodied beings who, by virtue (not by means) of their
physical presence, can portray transmutations of the ‘here and now’ which delin-
eate the immediate as a fragment of some different, or new, totality of meaning.
This underlines the point made by Merleau-Ponty (1962) that the ‘immediate
movement is transcended, or achieves significance, not in spite of our physical
form, but because of it’ (Radley 1996: 566). Woven into this conception of
embodiment is a strong role for affect. Affect is not simply emotion, nor is it
reducible to the affections or perceptions of an individual subject. ‘Percepts are
not perceptions, they are packets of sensations and relations that outlive those who
experience them. Affects are not feelings, they are becomings that go beyond those
who live through them (they become other)’ (Deleuze 1995: 13 7 ).
But we can ‘dumb down’ this notion and think of emotions as coursing through
the force fields of flesh and other objects, producing a continually changing
distribution of intensities which prefigure encounters, which set up encounters,
and which have to be worked on in these encounters (Gil 1998)? As Massumi
puts it:
affect is synaesthetic, implying a participation of the senses in each other: the
measurement of a living thing’s potential interaction is its ability to transform
the effects of one sensory mode into those of another.... Affects are virtual
synaesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually
existing particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its116 Part II