I have therefore regarded passions like love, hate, anger, envy, pride, pity, and
other feelings which agitate the mind... as properties which belong to it in
the same way as heat, cold, storm, thunder and the like belong to the nature
of the atmosphere.
(EthicsPref.: C 4 92)But affect will present differently to body and mind in each encounter. In the
attribute of body, affect structures encounters so that bodies are disposed for action
in a particular way. In the attribute of mind, affect structures encounters as a series
of modifications arising from the relations between ideas which may be more or
less adequate and more or less empowering. In other words, the issue is the
composition of an affective relationship. So
euphoria and dysphoria are not the ground of any given emotion any more
than musical harmony is the ground of the simultaneous tones which give
rise to it. The names of the many emotions we experience are merely the
names given to differently assembled euphoric or dysphoric relations, akin
to chords.
(Brown and Stenner 2001: 95)This emphasis on relations is important. Though Spinoza makes repeated
references to ‘individuals’ it is clear from his conception of bodies and minds and
affects as manifolds that for him the prior category is what he calls the ‘alliance’
or ‘relationship’. So affects, for example, occur in an encounter between mani-
fold beings, and the outcome of each encounter depends upon what forms of
composition these beings are able to enter in to.
Such a way of proceeding from relations and encounters has many echoes in
contemporary social science and forms the touchstone of much recent work in
human geography. Most especially, it shows up in work which is concerned to find
common complexes of relation, such as that informed by contemporary philo-
sophers and most notably Gilles Deleuze. Deleuze (1988b, 1990) added what
might be called an ethological spin to Spinoza’s assertion that things are never
separable from their relations with the world by drawing on the work of writers
like von Uexküll on the perceptual worlds of animals and then applying the same
kind of thinking to human beings. Thus Deleuze (1988b) considers the simplest
of von Uexküll’s animals, a tick, whose raison d’être is sucking the blood of passing
mammals. It appears to be capable of only three affects: light (climb to the top of
a branch), smell (fall on to a mammal that passes beneath the branch) and heat
(seek the warmest spot on the mammal). Deleuze then applies the same kind of
reasoning to human beings. But there he has to make the considerable reservation
that we really have no idea either what affects human bodies or minds might be
capable of in a given encounter ahead of time or, indeed, more generally, what
worlds human beings might be capable of building, so affects are ‘the nonhuman
becomings of man’ (Deleuze and Guattari 199 4 : 169). He is therefore led towards
a language/practice of different speeds and intensities which can track all the
Spatialities of feeling 179