Out of the Chaco

The section I am working on now has taken its own way. As usual it started in intuition, moved into an attempt to organize the ethnography,  when I wrote down the anecdotes I was made to think new issues, and now I need to clarify everything.

I wanted to present the complexity of Toba's movement to Buenos Aires and contend that those movements are beyond the economic causes. Of course Tobas were having a hard time in the Chaco, but why travel at a particular time, why some people and not all, why some people who are not among the ones in the worst situation. It is nor  just about "cultural practice" of moving,  why then Buenos Aires, why an argument with a boss triggers the movement in one case then. Finally it is not only about "politics" in its restrictive sense, is not the direct result of land expulsion or a move to make more effective claims. But in addition it is not just about escaping "patriarchal oppression" or for women to access work and education. I am trying to show that all these may be general backround for the migration, of course defining possibilities of how and when people move. However in the life histories what trigger the movement are particular moments that combine the specifics of the trajectory of that person and the broad political fields he is part of.

Lorenzo, he worked since he was a child, he was always exploited, always poor, but he moved to Buenos Aires when they do not give him work, when the union suggest he can pose a demand in Buenos Aires. He also links movement to being an orphan, with no clear direction and teachings.

Andrea moves to keep company to a sister, to take the opportunity for her extended family to own a house in Buenos Aires where they could all stay at if needed.  She does not want to move and her father sends her.

Carlos moves because he is tired, he has two daughters, he wants them to go to school and high-school. He is also an orphan.

Carolina follows her husband and they both escape sorcery because they are doing well.

Raul and Julio move after the military service, there they get skills and connections that make them want to explore Buenos Aires.

Estefania moves because she is doing well, she is young and organizing youth groups of the church, her father considers her strong and insists she moves and works in Buenos Aires.
   
I started the chapter wanting to argue that movements result of the way politics affect the personal trajectories of people. However now this is a bit big, too vague. If I talk about affect and affection is about the encounters,  the variations of ideas in the first case and the variation of the body in the second. I am not sure if I can unify these experiences, and yet moving all of them is related with a strength of the people moving and an intervention to shape (enhance) their capacity of action, in some cases the possibilities of a whole family. At the same time is not a single but multiple trajectories and multiple points that turn into going to Bs. As.

Many parts of Deleuze class on Spinoza I was rereading today to think this through this. 

What is called an idea, in the sense in which everyone has always taken it in the history of philosophy, is a mode of thought which represents something. A representational mode of thought.

we call affect any mode of thought which doesn’t represent anything. So what does that mean? Take at random what anybody would call affect or feeling, a hope for example, a pain, a love, this is not representational. There is an idea of the loved thing, to be sure, there is an idea of something hoped for, but hope as such or love as such represents nothing, strictly nothing.

here is a primacy of the idea over the affect for the very simple reason that in order to love it’s
necessary to have an idea, however confused it may be, however indeterminate it may be, of
what is loved.

....the formal reality of the idea, shall we say, is—but then in one blow it becomes
much more complicated and much more interesting—the reality of the idea insofar as it is
itself something. It’s necessary just to add that this formal reality of the idea will be what Spinoza very often terms a certain degree of reality or of perfection that the idea has as such. As such, every idea has a certain degree of reality or perfection. Undoubtedly this degree of reality or perfection is connected to the object that it represents, but it is not to be confused with the object. the affect by saying that affect is precisely a mode of thought which has no representational character. Now I come to define the idea by the following: every idea is something, not only is it the idea of something but it is something, that is to say it has a degree of reality which is proper to it.

 Spinoza employs the term “automaton”: we are, he says, spiritual automata, that is to say it is less we who have the ideas than the ideas which are affirmed in us. What also happens, apart from this succession of ideas? There is something else, that is, something in me never ceases to vary. There is a regime of variation which is not the same thing as the succession of ideas themselves. “Variations” must serve us for what we want to do, the trouble is that he doesn’t employ the word.

(variation) of my force of existing, or another word he employs as a synonym: vis existendi, the
force of existing, or potentia agendi, the power [puissance] of acting, and these variations are
perpetual. I would say that for Spinoza there is a continuous variation—and this is what it means to
exist—of the force of existing or of the power of acting.

He means that the idea indeed has to be primary in relation to the affect, the idea and the affect are two things which differ in nature, the affect is not reducible to an intellectual comparison of ideas, affect is constituted by the lived transition or lived passage from one degree of perfection to another, insofar as this passage is determined by ideas; but in itself it does not consist in an idea, but rather constitutes affect.

The three kinds of ideas that Spinoza distinguishes are affection (affectio) ideas; we’ll see that
affectio, as opposed to affectus, is a certain kind of idea. There would thus have been in the
first place affectio ideas, secondly we arrive at the ideas that Spinoza calls notions, and thirdly,
for a small number of us because it’s very difficult, we come to have essence ideas. Before
everything else there are these three sorts of ideas.

What is an affection (affectio)? I see your faces literally fall... yet this is all rather amusing. At
first sight, and to stick to the letter of Spinoza’s text, this has nothing to do with an idea, but it
has nothing to do with an affect either. Affectus was determined as the continuous variation of
the power of acting. An affection is what? In a first determination, an affection is the following:
it’s a state of a body insofar as it is subject to the action of another body. What is an affection of your body? Not the sun, but the action of the sun or the effect of the sun on you. In other words an effect, or the action that one body produces on another, once it’s noted that Spinoza, on the basis of reasons from his Physics, does not believe in action at a distance, action always implies a contact, and is even a mixture of bodies. Affectio is a mixture of two bodies, one body which is said to act on another, and the other receives the trace of the first. Every mixture of bodies will be termed an affection.

What I’ve defined up to now is solely the increase and diminution of the power of acting, and
whether the power of acting increases or diminishes, the corresponding affect (affectus) is
always a passion. Whether it be a joy which increases my power of acting or a sadnesss
which diminishes my power of acting, in both cases these are passions: joyful passions or sad
passions. Yet again Spinoza denounces a plot in the universe of those who are interested in
affecting us with sad passions. The priest has need of the sadness of his subjects, he needs
these subjects to feel themselves guilty. The auto-affections or active affects assume that we
possess our power of acting and that, on such and such a point, we have left the domain of the
passions in order to enter the domain of actions.   

So when my power of acting increases, it means that I am then relatively less separated, and inversely, but I am still formally separated from my power of acting, I do not possess it. In other words, I am not the cause of my own affects, and since I’m not the cause of my own affects, they are produced in
me by something else: I am therefore passive, I’m in the world of passion.   

You recall that an affection-idea is a mixture, that is to say the idea of an effect of a body on
mine. A notion-idea no longer concerns the effect of another body on mine, it’s an idea which
concerns and which has for its object the agreement or disagreement of the characteristic
relations between two bodies. I would say that the nominal definition of the notion is that it’s an idea
which, instead of representing the effect of a body on another, that is to say the mixture of two
bodies, represents the internal agreement or disagreement of the characteristic relations of
the two bodies. A notion is not at all abstract, it’s quite concrete: this body here, that body there.

What is common to all bodies? For example, being in movement or at rest. Movement and rest will be objects of notions said to be common to all bodies. Therefore there are common notions which designate something common to all bodies. There are also common notions which designate something
common to two bodies or to two souls...

... if you consider yourself as affected with sadness, I believe that everything is wretched, there is no longer an exit for one simple reason: nothing in sadness, which diminishes your power of acting, can induce you from within sadness to form a notion common to something which would be common to the bodies which affect you with sadness and to your own. For one very simple reason, that the body which affects you with sadness only affects you with sadness to the extent that it affects you in a
relation which does not agree with your own. Spinoza means something very simple, that sadness makes no one intelligent. In sadness one is wretched. It’s for this reason that the powers-that-be [pouvoirs] need subjects to be sad.

n an affect of joy, therefore, the body which affects you is indicated as combining its
relation with your own and not as its relation decomposing your own. At that point, something
induces you to form a notion of what is common to the body which affects you and to your own
body, to the soul which affects you and to your own soul. In this sense joy makes one intelligent.

Spinoza doesn’t think at all like a rationalist, among the rationalists there is the world of reason and there are the ideas. If you have one, obviously you have all of them: you are reasonable. Spinoza thinks that being reasonable, or being wise, is a problem of becoming, which changes in a singular fashion the contents of the concept of reason. It’s necessary to know the encounters which agree with
you. No one could ever say that it’s good for her/him when something exceeds her/his power
of being affected.

But if we knew in what order the relations of the whole universe are combined, we could define a power of being affected of the whole universe, which would be the cosmos, the world insofar as it’s a body or a soul. At this moment the whole world is only one single body following the order of relations which are combined. At this moment you have, to speak precisely, a universal power of being affected: God, who is the whole universe insofar as He is its cause, has by nature a universal power of being affected. It’s useless to say that he’s in the process of using the idea of God in a strange manner.

Spinoza proposes the opposite: instead of summarizing of our sadnesses, taking a local point of departure on a joy on the condition that we feel that it truly concerns us. On that point one forms the common notion, on that point one tries to win locally, to open up this joy.

What Spinoza calls singular essence, it seems to me, is an intensive quality, as if each one
of us were defined by a kind of complex of intensities which refers to her/his essence, and
also of relations which regulate the extended parts, the extensive parts. So that, when I have
knowledge [connaissance] of notions, that is to say of relations of movement and rest which regulate the agreement or disagreement of bodies from the point of view of their extended
parts, from the point of view of their extension, I don’t yet have full possession of my essence
to the extent that it is intensity.

The third kind of knowledge, or the discovery of the essence-idea, occurs when, on the basis of the
common notions, by a new dramatic turn, one happens to pass into this third sphere of the
world: the world of essences. There one knows in their correlation what Spinoza calls—in any
case one cannot know the one without the other—the singular essence which is mine and the
singular essence which is God’s and the singular essence of external things.

... from the point of view of relations which govern the extended parts of a body or a
soul, the extensive parts, all bodies do not agree with one another; if you arrive at a world of
pure intensities, all these are supposed to agree with one another. At that moment, the love
of yourself and at the same time, as Spinoza says, the love of things other than you, and at the
same time the love of God, and the love God bears for Himself, etc... What interests me in this
mystical point is this world of intensities. There, you are in possession, not merely formally but
in an accomplished way. It’s no longer even joy, Spinoza finds the mystical word beatitude or
active affect, that is to say the auto-affect. But this remains quite concrete.

evento y pliegue

No se muy bien como voy a hacer con estos ds niveles, estoy escribiendo sobre la bien empirica marcha indigena del bicentenario y de golpe necesito leer esto para contestar preguntas que me surgen de q estoy hablando exactamente, por que elijo la marcha para empezar la tesis, donde empieza y termina la marcha, pfff en fin. y a la vez para que discutir con deleuze si no termino de entender nunca que quiere decir (en el buen sentido, no se si me puedo sentar a charlar con el o no), mas bien lo puedo incorporar torpemente y seguir adelante.  


from the Fold, Leibniz and the Baroque, translated by Tom Conley, the University of Minnesota Press, 1992.

That is clearly the first component or condition of both Whitehead's and Leibniz's definition of the event: extension. Extension exists when one element is stretched over the following ones, such that it is a whole and the following elements are its parts. Such a connection of whole-parts forms an infinite series that contains neither a final term nor a limit (the limits of our senses being excepted). The event is a vibration with an infinity of harmonics or submultiples, such as an audible wave, a luminous wave, or even an increasingly smaller part of space over the course of an increasingly shorter duration. For space and time are not limits but abstract coordinates of all series, that are themselves in extension: the minute, the second, the tenth of a second. . . . Then we can consider a second component of the event: extensive series have intrinsic properties (for example, height, intensity, timbre of a sound, a tint, a value, a saturation of color), which enter on their own account in new infinite series, now converging toward limits, with the relation among limits establishing a conjunction. Matter, or what fills space and time, offers characters that always determine its texture as a function of different materials that are part of it. No longer are these extensions but, as we have seen, intensions, intensities, or degrees. It is something rather than nothing, but also this rather than that: no longer the indefinite article, but the demonstrative pronoun. How remarkable that Whitehead's analysis, based on mathematics and physics, appears to be completely independent of Leibniz's work even though it coincides with it!
Then comes the third component, which is the individual. There the confrontation with Leibniz is the most direct. For Whitehead the individual is creativity, the formation of a New. No longer is it the indefinite or the demonstrative mood, but a personal mood. If we call an element everything that has parts and is a part, but also what has intrinsic features, we say that the individual is a "concrescence" of elements. This is something other than a connection or a conjunction. It is, rather, a prehension: an element is the given, the "datum" of another element that prehends it. Prehension is individual unity. Everything prehends its antecedents and its concomitants and, by degrees, prehends a world. The eye is a prehension of light. Living beings prehend water, soil, carbon, and salts. At a given moment the pyramid prehends Napoleon's soldiers (forty centuries are contemplating us), and inversely. We can say that "echoes, reflections, traces, prismatic deformations, perspective, thresholds, folds" are prehensions that somehow anticipate psychic life. The vector of prehension moves from the world to the subject, from the prehended datum to the prehending one (a "superject"); thus the data of a prehension are public elements, while the subject is the intimate or private element that expresses immediacy, individuality, and novelty. But the prehended, the datum, is itself a preexisting or coexisting prehension, such that all prehension is a prehension of prehension, and the event thus a "nexus of prehensions." Each new prehension becomes a datum. It becomes public, but for other prehensions that objectify it; the event is inseparably the objectification of one prehension and the subjectification of another; it is at once public and private, potential and real, participating in the becoming of another event and the subject of its own becoming.
Beyond the prehending and the prehended, prehension offers three other characteristics. First, the subjective form is the way by which the datum is expressed in the subject, or by which the subject actively prehends the datum (emotion, evaluation, project, conscience . . . ). It is the form in which the datum is folded in the subject, a "feeling" or manner, at least when prehension is positive. For there are negative prehensions that exist as long as the subject excludes certain data from its concrescence, and is thus only filled by the subjective form of this exclusion. Second, the subjective aim assures the passage from one datum to another in a prehension, or from one prehension to another in a becoming, and places the past in a present portending the future. Finally, satisfaction as a final phase, as self-enjoyment, marks the way by which the subject is filled with itself and attains a richer and richer private life, when prehension is filled with its own data. This is a biblical - and, too, a neo-Platonic - notion that English empiricism carried to its highest degree (notably with Samuel Butler). The plant sings of the glory of God, and while being filled all the more with itself it contemplates and intensely contracts the elements whence it proceeds. It feels in this prehension the self-enjoyment of its own becoming.

Escritura y metodo

Hoy no estoy avanzando mucho en la escritura en si, me paso la mañana pensando el orden de lo que voy a presentar en el capítulo. Jugando con tarjetas mientras armaba el esquema general que me guia ahora decidi que cada capitulo sea, a grandes razgos, trayectorias hacia un lugar y la construcción - ensamblaje de ese lugar. Lo que pasa claro que me acerco a este capitulo y las trayectorias son absolutamente distintas, las llegadas y partidas son demaciadas, y eso que no hice un seguimiento exaustivo de muchos casos sino unos muy pocos en profundidad.

Entonces hablo de distintas trayectorias con distintos caminos, en distintos momentos, con distintas velocidades. Y la llegada a un mismo lugar pero que aparece como muchos lugares, distintos y superpuestos. Bueno esto es algo que ya sabia, ahora es un desafio grande la escritura, de eso depende que se pueda hacer honor a esta complegidad o que se pierda en el camino.

Tambien me pregunto si en algun momento me tendria que haber puesto mas sistematica, registrar datos basicos de casi toda la poblacion del barrio hacer algo asi como una encuesta, donde nacieron, donde vivieron, cuando vivieron en cada lugar. En fin, lo pense, pero todos los problemas de hacer esto al final me detuvieron y el registro informal quedo medio trunco. Cuanta gente nacio en la villa y cuantos de la generacion 1.5 vive ahi, en fin.


 



   

Migración o movimientos afectivos

Llegué al momento en el que tengo que explicar en la tesis la trayectoria del Chaco a Buenos Aires. Por supuesto toda a bibliografía y todos hablamos de los motivos económicos y territoriales que empujan a los tobas afuera del Chaco. Sin embargo estoy tratando de centrarme en la otra dimensión de estos movimientos. Y los relatos de la gente con la que trabajé me recuerdan que mi obsesión teórica con entender de que va la discusión sobre el afecto no sale de la nada. 

Por ejemplo Lorenzo me explica claramente que llega a Buenos Aires por trabajo. Pero cuando me describe el momento de su migración se cruzan varias otros motivos. Lorenzo es hijo de un cacique importante, de los últimos en concentrar el mando de varios grupos. Es el hijo menor y según el algo así como un preferido de su padre. A los 11 años el padre muere. Antes de morir le intenta pasar poder sobrenatural pero los hermanos mayores celosos de la relación le impiden la entrada al cuarto donde el padre moría e impiden la transmisión. Como suelen hacer ante la muerte, todos abandonan la casa. La madre se recluye con hermanos en otra localidad y lo deja al cuidado de una tía y un tío. A partir de ese momento Lorenzo queda solo y arreglándose por su cuenta. Empieza a trabajar para el ingenio de azúcar, viaja solo, decide donde va a vivir, e incluso se enfrenta solo a seres no humanos que lo persiguen a donde vaya. Pero vive sin guía, sin nadie que lo aconseje. Según sus propios relatos por estar sin guía deja el colegio, deja pasar oportunidades, es ingenuo y se deja engañar por compañeros.  Esa sensación de desamparo lo marca de por vida. 

Entonces su relato de como decide irse a Buenos Aires solo se entiende en ese contexto. Llega la temporada de cosecha en el ingenio y el se presenta a trabajar y le niegan el trabajo. Pero el ve como mucha gente que ha viajado hasta allí para trabajar es empleada. A el, por algún motivo solo le dan unas pocas horas de trabajo. Los capataces que lo conocían  a él de varios años, que lo conocían al padre me explica, lo dejan solo "solito", hace silencio largo, sin trabajo pero también desamparado. Se cansa, piensa que no puede ser que no le den trabajo, toma una dirección que un conocido de paso por las palmas y entonces en buenos aires, le dio y parte a la ciudad en tren.

Al mismo tiempo, y como me sorprendió el relato de Lorenzo en varios puntos, aparece una dimensión de lucha política pero que apenas deja escurrir en su relato y lo presenta como algo menor. Desde mi perspectiva acciones que demuestran coraje y convicción, el las presenta como detalles no relevantes. Así  me contará que estaba con dolor en el pecho (quizás por eso no le dieron trabajo?) y con ayuda del gremio, llego preparado a  presentar una devanada a la compañía de azúcar. Sin embargo los papeles médicos que trae se queman en un incendio a los pocos días de haber llegado a la isla maciel y nunca inicia la demanda. Lo mueve algo mas allá  del desempleo en si y que es el afecto de haberse quedado sin trabajo, la sensación de injusticia y desamparo (si puedo nombrar los afectos) y el enojo (bue pero jaca hablamos de nuevo codificando el afecto y hablo de una emoción, digamos que algo anterior al enojo y también una forma mas bien distinta de lo que seria enojo al menos para mi) de que el ingenio no de respuesta ni reconozca su enfermedad.

Imagen de http://neuronasquemadas2009.blogspot.com/2010/07/made-in-argentina.html

Bueno ahora de vuelta a la tesis.   

 

 

Buenos Aires en el Chaco

Estoy hace dos semanas releyendo historias de vida, feliz de tener esta grabaciones y leerlas y releerlas. Termine el lunes con la de Lorenzo (seudónimo) persona de mayor edad del barrio y legendario "informante" de generaciones de antropólogo (y me pregunto si tiene sentido usar seudónimo, pero sí). Algo que me sorprendió es que en sus aventuras en el Chaco aparecen en distintos momentos figuras no humanas que remiten a su posterior experiencia en Buenos Aires. Buenos Aires ya y de antemano había determinado su experiencia en el Chaco, incluso antes de haber siquiera imaginado ir para allá.

A los 11 años se le aparece un ser con la capacidad de mutar, que lo sigue y le ronda en distintos momentos de su vida. En este caso toma la forma de tigre. Lo ve primero caminando, cerca de un laguna. Esta vestido de azul y pasa fumando. Deja el cigarrillo se aleja y desaparece entre los pastos para aparecer de nuevo con forma de tigre, rayado. Le pregunto si cuando es humano esta vestido como  gaucho y me dice que no que es el trajecito de trabajador como el que usaba después en el puerto, pero bien limpito.

Otra vez es joven de unos 20 años y esta pescando y ve algo raro, como una lancha pero que no es lancha de verda. No le dice a los compañeros pero esa noche vuelve solo y se encuentra con un puente, igual al punte que años después construyen entre La Boca y Dock Sud.

Estaba mas bien concentrada en los otros desplazamientos, del Chaco a Buenos Aires, o los posteriores de Buenos Aires de vuelta a Chaco pero que son en forma de mercancías, mensajes, noticias. No había considerado como llega Buenos Aires al Chaco antes de que ellos lleguen, y menos aun los desplazamientos no-humanos en los que Buenos Aires de extiende al Chaco.

Buenos Aires

En esta primer etapa de escritura de un capitulo de la tesis, que es basicamente descripciones y más descripciones algo que me aparece algo que tengo que terminar de desenredar y es que buenos aires  más que como lugar me aparece como entidad, buenos aires expulsa y atrae, "se piensa" blanca, da lugar a grupos en momentos pero solo si se presentan como dentro de ciertos modos. Por supuesto aca hay algo de buenos aires y sus grupos dominantes, pero decir grupo dominante es tan inespecifico en la etnografia como decir marginal o subalterno.  Bueno no se si estoy hablando de Buenos Aires como ensamblaje en funcionamiento pero mirada desde donde. Me recomendaron leer el Lefebvre de urbanismo. A ver que sale, me parece que contestar esto va a ser una de las claves del trabajo.

 

spinoza II

Bueno sin salir del estilo nota. En una conexion con saltos, una de las cosas que me hizo pensar bastante de leer la etica es que spinoza no es un critico al pensamiento, pero si es critico a cierta forma de pensar. Le parece ridiculo el racionalismo que plantee poderes ilimitados de la razón y que da por sentada la libertad del individuo para actuar. El dice que pensar que el hombre es libre es ignorante. Ignorante de las multiples fuerzas externas que afectan a cualquier cuerpo. Ahi es cuando de golpe manda una definición de estupidez que viene tan bien para el trabajo como para la vida. Estupidez es cuando uno cree que esta explicando algo pero en realidad te estan faltando varias causas atraz del resultado que ves o cuando tomas el resultado como causa. A su vez los conflictos entre personas para Spinoza son sonflictos de entendimiento, no de intereses o de differencia.

(mucho tiempo despues esta inversion es por ejemplo la que hace latour cuando dice no hay que pensar cuales son las causas sociales a un problema x. sino ir más atraz estudiar conexiones y después hacernos la gran pregunta de que chucha es lo social en lo que estamos estudiando. como se ensambla lo social en asi)

Es por esto que cuando habla de afectos y de pensamiento esta hablando de algo mucho mas parecido a pensar en como se distribuyen las particulas de un gas que en una emoción. En la seccion sobre la mente explica como cuando un cuerpo que se encuentran con otro y no puede moverlo rebota.

Bueno vendran citas directas más abajo en breve. 

spinoza

I was never able to finish this here it goes to be continued...

I want to make at least a couple of notes with ideas about Spinoza before  keep on reading more about him. So i finished a  more detailed reading of the Ethics on January the 5 th. I was simultaneously reading Spinoza o la Prudencia a recent book from Ch. Jaquet I bought in Buenos Aires , Spinoza para principiantes (written by the translator of the former book, A. Cherniavsky), Spinoza practical Philosophy from Deleuze and his courses on Spinoza.  I did not finish any of them but I also piled Deleuze on Expresionism and a book by Kaminsky Rendija is reading. Anyways here a few points:

- Affect as taken in contemporary debates seems to be this post-representation, post dualistic relations  space of roughly speaking freedom, an alternative to resistance and the traps that have been widely  showed after Foucault. It seems to be the cool thing in media studies, a film is politically mobilizing  if it affects its multicultural audience into processing their condition (something like this in Laura Marks), we can talk of the active dimension of a book if it generates a circulation of affect, and so on. Affect thus is rightly confronted to habit and the structuration of life (Beasley Murray and Bourdieu), but in many authors is maybe too soon opposed to power and locate as new redemptive space.  However in this explorations I still find it a bit obscure how affect is present in the ordinary and the everyday (K Stuart make a very interesting experiment but remains in the experimental) and how it assembles the social (Latour seems to be getting to it even when he does not talk about affect). I need to reread Mazzarella who seems to be doing a good job making an ethnography of affect and beyond his book had a very good paper on the AAA 2009.

But what I want to say is that Spinoza is much more discrete about affect than most (not all) of this celebratory approaches seem to be doing. It seems than the current uses of affect either mistake it for emotion, only that they give it a stronger social force (A panel I heard in the aaa in 2008 was about the erotized affect to god of a particular religious community - for me that was emotion-, the affect of suicidal widows - emotion again-) and of course the aura of emancipatory force in itself, seems to be used as a "post" and "flexible" concept. Of course Massumi who is a strong reference in this turn into affect, shows that power is becoming affective (also Nigel Thrift, although not so clear), thus they are alert to show that not all about affect is about. I think that both lines are a bit confusing, the one that takes affect as a new turn in how to talk about emotions, and the one that stands on affects as the new concept for resistance.  

Back to Spinoza he interestingly gives us this concept that allows us to think in a physics of bodies, but he does not take affect as the space of redemption, contraryly for him is action (in the dimension of the body) and adequate ideas (the active dimension of mind) what create freedom. For him we need to understand affects, accept them and and strive to increase bodies capacities.

On the Affects
Thus I find in Spinoza a more challenging proposal on how to think the bodies and affect as a domain of the transformations of the bodies, transformations of which they are not the adequate and only cause, but they cannot avoid. Affect is about how the external bodies interact with an assembled and stable body. His chapter on the affects is a list of them in which he stresses how affects transform the capacities if the body and in which sense. One point I take is how he understands the transformation of the body at each moment. Thus a glass of wine can elevate your joy but as you get stuck in it and want to repeat the joy without having appropriate knowledge of the consequences one can keep on drinking and finally poisoning (a word he uses a lot) the body.

The final point of the chapter is however to propose the remedies for the affects and in a way to learn how to flow with them taking as much joy as possible until "one" can learn to be adequate  cause to joy, a kind of enlighted, or all consious, type of action - knowledge.


Mind and body as one and the same

On knowledge 
The book is a lot about knowledge, for him the main action of the Mind.       
Mind
Adequate Ideas

Physics
God or Nature.
Body and the two dimensions : a) stability of movement of the parts, motion and rest and b) capacity to affect and be affected. 
Action (when one is the only cause of it)

One difference with Nitsche

bergson

estoy tratando de suspender un poco la lectura de spinoza y engancharme con bergson para leerlo para nuetsro grupo. de la stanford encyclopedia of philosophy esto si que suena interesante:  

There is no negation in the duration. We shall return to this important point concerning negation when discussing “Creative evolution.”  In any case, the feelings are continuous with one another; they interpenetrate one another, and there is even an opposition between inferior needs and superior needs. A qualitative multiplicity is therefore heterogeneous (or singularized), continuous (or interpenetrating), oppositional (or dualistic) at the extremes, and progressive (or temporal, an irreversible flow, which is not given all at once). Because a qualitative multiplicity is heterogeneous and yet interpenetrating, it cannot be adequately represented by a symbol; indeed, for Bergson, a qualitative multiplicity is inexpressible. Bergson also calls the last characteristic of temporal progress mobility. For Bergson — and perhaps this is his greatest insight — freedom is mobility. Because Bergson connects duration with mobility, in the second half of the Twentieth Century (in Deleuze and Foucault, in particular), the Bergsonian concept of qualitative multiplicity will be dissociated from time and associated with space (Deleuze 1986).

the flaming lips yoshimi battles the pink robots part 1

cuerpos

un post aun mas vomitado que los que ya hacia, robándole un rato a uno de los ciclos de 2 o 3 horas, los minutos que debería aprovechar para bañarme o cumplir con la hora de trabajo que me propongo o hacer algo de ejercicio. seguramente no es tema para un blog, pero esto se convirtió en mi cuadernito de notas axial que aca va.

que decir del ultimo mes, hoy con la fecha calendario que se cumple desde que franka apareció finalmente por un hueco de la panza, tosiendo y si era ella nomás. otro cuerpo mucho mas flexible, robusto en su pequeñez, infinitamente lindo, con respuestas transparentes y sensaciones inmediatas. un mejor cuerpo de dos cuerpos. 

y si como dijo mi hermana a partir de ese momento no importo nada mas, y uno se confronta con lo que no podía creer del todo. por mas que se anticipa en largos meses y crece y se mueve y te va avisando que esta ahí, no lo podía creer del todo hasta que escuche la tos y vi. una persona nueva. por suerte fue ese momento que deje de pensar en los libros de foucault en aceptar o discutir con sospecha a las propuestas de enfermeras, que desde que entre al hospital pasaron a tener  ella y no los médicos un poder casi arrollador sobre el cuerpo de uno, deje de esperar que pasara la medica de "mi" clínica a charlar desenfrenadamente y decir algún chiste, se termino la sensación de que el trabajo no terminaba mas y el estado para siempre. como hasta ese momento solo me concentraba en las discusiones medicas técnicas, me pase los minutos anteriores teniendo una charla de sala de espera con la anestesióloga, "where in britain are you from?, "do people surf in the summer?" ella me contestaba de un buen humor increíble y a la vez me informaba que pasaba del otro lado de la cortina. y esa charla sobre el surf en el sur de Inglaterra se convirtieron en los últimos minutos de una etapa anterior, no totalmente distinta pero anterior a que apareciera una tercera de dos. 

que mas puedo decir de el fin de esa etapa, que el día anterior hubo sol y fue un día lindísimo, que fuimos a nadar, y que terminé un lectura mas lenta y obsesiva de la ética de espinoza y estaba empezando una lectura ambiciosa de textos secundarios sobre él. tuve esta pagina de blog abierta todo el día y el día siguiente mientras pasaban olas de músculos en tensión, pero no pude articular nada para completarla en ese momento.

que decir del mes desde que apareció? no puedo expresarlo todavia y no se si se puede. maravillada del encuentro, rodeadas de un olor dulzon, cuerpos medio menos desodorizados que de costumbre, una intensidad aperentemente pasiva, una vida mas parecida a ser un deportista, algo asi como un triatlon adentro de una casa, natacion olimpica dentro de una bañadera de plastico. 

 spinoza fue la mejor lectura que pude hacer antes y ahora veo un cuerpo que por ahora es casi todo puro afecto, algunas ideas que se forman de a poco, algo de habito que se repite pero por las necesidades del cuerpo y los afectos de otros, y no tanto por una costumbre corporizada. lo bueno y lo malo son cosas con causas bastante simples y totalmente inmediatas y claras. se supone que los recién llegados son cuerpos carentes, vulnerables, dependientes, frágiles, demandantes, pasivos. en realidad lo experimento totalmente opuesto. si claro que uno se la pasa con sueño interrumpido, que el alimento lo necesitan con mucha regularidad, que necesitan cuidado. pero tienen un potencia difícil de igualar en otro momento de la vida, son mucho mas fuertes en su flexibilidad que estas versiones adultas que somos nosotros, dependen no de alguien en particular sino de muchas personas diferentes con las que se relacionan en un plano de igualdad total (si claro el olor del cuerpo de donde salieron, y la voz parece generarles una tranquilidad bastante inmediata pero nunca irremplazable). Demandan solo lo que necesita su cuerpo para expandirse a una velocidad increíble, y trabajan obstinadamente en conseguir su alimento, sin importar en que medio social hayan nacido, trabajan sin alineación, trabajan cooperando, y descansan cuando ya no necesitan trabajar mas, no tienen aun el apremio de acumular, de apropiarse del trabajo ajeno, la ambición del reconocimiento. no iría al extremo de idealizar que es un estado absolutamente puro, pero si que es una etapa con una potencia a la que estaría bueno aproximarse de nuevo, acercarse desaprendiendo todo lo que inevitablemente le haremos aprender. ahí spinoza dejaba el consejo de que esta bueno ser una familia cuando la unión aumenta la potencia de los cuerpos involucrados y cuando colaboramos en formar un pensamiento intuitivo, ideas adecuadas que vengan de una mente activa y no de las pasiones externas que la desvían y confunden. 

bueno y las imagines por la subita camaraderia que siento con las vacas, aun me sorprende como es que en el plano de mercantilizar el cuerpo la leche humana no este siendo tan explotada, y me pregunto si es un poco por el borramiento de la lactancia de la escena. mucho enfasis en que se haga pero mucho enfasis en que quede fuera de escena.