In considering the concepts utilised in this chapter, it is necessary to address the concepts of virtual and actual. These concepts refer to the notion that experience is always limited. That is, the way we experience the world through the sets of relations that constitute everyday life is necessarily selective. We see the world through circuits of action and reaction, how social processes influence experience, and how our actions feedback into these, forming feedback loops (Hacking, 1999). For Deleuze, this is entirely necessary, and yet does not tell the whole story. These circuits of action and reaction are the actual: that which is experienced. However, there are always far more connections between relations that are not actualised, which do not come to be
that there is always far more potential, more connections than our particular position and bodies can apprehend. This is the virtual, the sense that there exists the capacity for new connections beyond those that have been formed. In every sense the virtual is immanent in the actual. What the virtual refers to is the constant and ever present potential for experience to spin off in a new direction, along a new line of flight. Until this happens, a new line of flight cannot be apprehended, as it has not yet become. And yet, it is firmly grounded in the actual: new lines of flight can only spin off from the socio-non-discursive matrix of the present, the actual as currently experienced. As soon as a new line of flight is experienced it is no longer the virtual, as it is then the actual. In this sense, the virtual can never be experienced. The potential though is in some sense beyond our experience, but not necessarily outside of it. A rather banal metaphor for this is the notion that ‘tomorrow never comes’. We are aware that the potential for tomorrow to arrive is present, but once it comes, it becomes today, and as such, tomorrow is never actually experienced. This is exactly why it is the virtual, it is the ever present potential for new experience.
6.4 Affect
The concept of affect is being used here to refer to the aspects of experience that are not directly linguistically mediated (i.e. forms of content), but, nevertheless, relate to discourse. The aim is to gain an analytic hook into the ‘felt’ tone of experience. So far we have developed an understanding of the captured nature of service user experience, through recognising the multiple reifications offered by the variety of different forms of knowledge that represent mental health. This understanding presents us with a problem - how to avoid offering yet another reification of service users’ experiences? One means through which to approach this is through drawing on the concept of affect, which was introduced in Chapter One. This concept allows us to talk about experience without solely re-formulating it through the myriad extant
representations already available. At the heart of this is the notion of the infolding of social context into experience. Throughout this thesis, we have seen a number of ways that service users’ experiences are formed through the infolding of context. For
instance, the experience of having a diagnostic identity is formed when service users are forced to negotiate a set of culturally prescribed meanings and categories around ‘schizophrenia’. Service users then have to re-code their experience in relation to these categories and find ways of ‘living them out’ in their own lives. In this sense
something of the tone of their experience is constituted by transforming the social and cultural context into a liveable life. Experience is then infolded, so that the outside (culturally derived categories) become inside (lived experience).
Affect denotes this infolding. It is precisely the event of bodies coming together and forming new connections. It is the colliding of previous codings, and the action of the subsequent re-codings of previous relations to form new relations. With regard to the present chapter, affect is required as a concept to illuminate some of the ways that service users’ bodies inter-relate and connect with medication, and the subsequent new connections and relations formed. More than this, affect is the production of these relations in such a way that we recognise the potential for new experiences to be formed. In this way, affect is not just the infolding of context, but also the infolding of biology. It is not that biology then drives experience, but it is taken up in experience, through being recruited into various forms of experience by service users. Affect is the knot of multiple infoldings, cultural and biological.
In the following chapter we see how connections made by service users’ bodies flow into the production of spatialised experience. In this way we are drawing on a
Deleuzian idea of the body as not defined in terms of its form, or as an individual subject, nor even by the organs held within it (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). Rather it is defined according to the flows of relations through which it passes and is produced. So, it is not appropriate to consider bodies as definitive individuated beings separate from the contexts through which they are produced. Bodies are the products of any “given relations of movement and rest, speed and slowness (longitude); the sum total of the intensive affects it is capable of at a given power or degree of potential (latitude)” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987: 287). Affect is this very aspect, the potential that exists in any set of relations to shift direction, form new relations, spin off on new lines of flight. To understand the body for service users, we need to analyse it as a movement, a process, as constantly changing through the inter-connecting non-discursive elements that produce it.
‘affect is precisely this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this two-sidedness as seen from the side of the actual
thing, as couched in its perceptions and cognitions. Affect is the virtual as point of view.’ (Massumi, 2002: 228)
By way of an extended example let us take the cognitive model of mental health: that which purports that service users’ experiences which become labelled as mental
disorders (i.e. false beliefs, hearing voices) are the result of faulty cognitions (Garety & Freeman, 1999; Maher, 1974). Somewhere along the line there is a discrepancy in perception that results in an erroneous set of experiences emerging. Service users’ experiences become captured by a cognitive knowledge framework, which claims them as its own, and negates any desire to explore alternative ontologies of experience. This is problematic, as it organises service users’ experiences in such a way that reification is impossible to avoid. Mental health experiences are taken as wholly embodied within the cognitive operations of the ‘mind’. It is perception that is given primacy: we start with perception and see that for service users a fault occurs, which leads to their mental health difficulties. What affect opens up is the potential to introduce change as an analytic. It de-individualises experience, through offering a way of thinking that recognises that experience is not wholly captured by cognitions, and that to make perception the starting point is problematic, as it embodies a static stability that negates movement. Affect enables us to avoid setting out from a static starting point of, for instance, cognition. Rather, we can think of bodies as defined not in terms of being driven by cognitive processes, but as produced according to the multiple fluid relations that form them.
The starting point for an analysis of service users’ bodies in relation to medication is to begin with the kinds of relations between bodies that form their experiences, and then to analyse how these relations work to produce forms of spatialised experience. What is required is a way of analysing how service users’ experiences are generated through an infolding of the relational contexts they operate within. How it is that social context, and the multiple forms of socio-linguistic forms of knowledge and meaning work to capture and organise experience. And, how this operates in a way that pushes commonly understood individualised experience (e.g. emotions) into spatialised settings. This works through relations of force engaging us into different tendencies (Massumi, 2002), which are organised patterns of experience. The potential to produce
new tendencies is an affective matter. An understanding of affect is the central hub of this process: that of framing change.
In laying out the concept of affect, we are considering the body in a quite specific way. Traditional theories of the body have considered how bodies are captured, and then questioned the different paradigms in terms of their utility with regard to informing about human experience. The obvious example is the Cartesian mind-body split, which has not only served such a prominent role in the way we think about bodies (Turner, 1984), but also has been the stubborn mule that so much critique has gnawed away at (Burkitt, 1999; Crossley, 2001). What all these approaches share is reification, concentrating on de-coding the body, and offering up a new coding, although they all have the body there as a factor in the first instance, however unstable and socio- historically contingent they claim it to be. Massumi (2002), following an analytic thread that takes in Spinoza, Bergson, along with Deleuze and Guattari, wants to shift focus, move the starting point. He argues that to begin with analysing the body according to the multiple grids of coding in which it is captured, however much variance exists between them, is to essentially be dealing with captured forms, with stability, however complex such stability may be. Massumi wants to start with
movement and feeling, to think nothing else of the body at this stage aside from these two things, “[I]t moves. It feels. In fact, it does both at the same time.” (2002: 1). We should never lose sight of this for Massumi, to do so is to forego the ability to think
change; process. In this chapter, the aim is to think change, and to consider how
service users’ bodies are captured by different codings through the multiple relations of force. However, we also need to be aware that since change is precisely what evades capture, we will not be able to ‘see’ it directly in the data itself. Hence we will be using concepts to extrapolate or deduce change from what we can see. That is, restore
movement back to experience. It is this aspect that constitutes the novelty of what I am calling Deleuzian Discourse Analysis. In addition, we will see points at which
dimensions of both previous codings and new codings interchange. These occur through the production of spaces that illuminate change and process, rather than solely reify bodies without a sense of the potential of process.