Unfamiliar Territory_Research

of response, by action: “Nobody as yet has determined the limits of the body’s capabilities: that is, nobody as yet
has learned from experience what the body can and cannot do.” 56
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When discussing affect the focus is not on individual body’s emotions or individual capacities to act but rather
on what a body can do in relation to other bodies, in specific socio-material formations and provisional
orderings. Massumi defines affect as an unqualified intensity, in sharp contrast to emotion, which he sees as
personal and identified: “An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an
experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the
conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions,
into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized.” 57
While it is important to recognise the difference between emotions and affects, in practice they go hand in hand
– they are always already entangled with one another in encounters.
Simondon treats affection (what he terms affectivity) as a mode of bodily experience that does not necessarily
correspond to previously known bodily habits or already constituted frameworks, as perception does. While
perception is already qualified and formed, affect is open and unpredictable. Affectivity, according to Simondon,
is found in-between, between an individual and preindividual, between a body and its becomings. Affectivity
brings to the experience something from the exterior, an affective force indicating that an individual is not a
closed set of relations but an evolving body holding the power to continually become. Affectivity triggers
material-affective responses that are not found in the reflective mind but are rooted in the body (not exclusively
human). Therefore, affects are pre-subjective, non-cognitive forces and intensities that are experienced prior to
consciousness, intensions, meanings or reason. They are nonsignifying, yet they influence our actions and get
quickly picked up by thinking, speaking and conscious reasoning which organizes them into ordered and
recognizable perceptions. When we perceive a tree, for instance, we name it ‘a tree’ because we have learnt how a
tree should look like. Through the course of evolution our perception helped us to narrow down its complex
reality to those few things we need to know in everyday life – we could say that ‘a tree’ became something like an
user interface. But what is actually going on and what we typically fail to see is a composition of nutrients,
energy and water flows, reflected light, respiration, arrangement of pigments, cell division, decay, food storage,
absorption, vegetative reproduction, community interactions and so on. A tree will remain a tree, but in order to
see it differently, in previously unforeseen ways, one would need to change the register and let oneself be
affected through altered, disordered sensations that would disrupt our habituated perception and form and
reform our bodies. This is how ‘the unfamiliar’ as affect works – through the power of aesthetic persuasion that
makes us realize there might be more to us and to the world that we currently imagine.
6.1 landscape experience
Landscape experience has always been tightly knit with vision. Of course, the multitude of senses and the
experience of movement should not be neglected, but since the understanding of landscape requires perception
56
Spinoza, B., Shirley, S. and Morgan, M. (2002). Complete works. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Pub, Book III, proposition 2,
Scholium, 280.
57
Massumi, B. (2002). Parables for the virtual. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p.28.
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