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.