Chocolate, Incense, Gagaku, Hiccup Music, Paper Airplanes, and other forms of Interaffectivity

David Liu, a doctoral fellow in our Interface Seminar at Duke, led us on a fully-sensory journey from the pre-Socratics to Deleuze last week. In his dissertation, he is attempting no less than the recovery of a different tradition of affect, one that (hail, Deleuze!) works at solving the mind/body problem and the human/machine interface binary. He got rid of the /.

He started by handing out chocolate bars, reminding us that ancient orators had to begin by wooing the good will, attention, and disposition of the crowd. The speaker was always susceptible of being shouted down so oration began with some gesture of affect, to ensure that the audience would attend, not boo. David distributed chocolate.

But the bars were not all alike. So we broke off bits of the kind we liked. Then, he noted that, although we had choice, he had distributed the bars and all had cocoa content of more than 70% so "free will" was actually quite inter-relational, interaffective in his term, some coming together of his will and our will, a playing along, if you will, in order to make the oration (the Seminar) work.

He played music. He burned incense, inviting anyone to tell him if they wanted anything to stop, continuing the metaphor of I/Me/You/We without the /. He played 13th century polyphonic "hiccup music," chanting where each voice sang part of a line and only in aggregate was the full melodic line present. He showed photographs where subjects were visible or not visible or in-the-process-of-being-made-visible because of his narration and, over and over, in sights, sounds, smells, tastes, he was emphasizing the ways that emplacement works in medias res, in the middle, medium, media. He said, very beautifully, "We are not in the midst. We are the midst." Media are not external to what happens but are the effectors themselves. Co-producers, not an end-stage. Interaffectivity means there are continual loops and mutual reconstructions and mutual influences, very Spinoza. David tried to get us to imagine an affect not suffused in human subjectivity. David helped us imagine without interiority and exteriority but a kind of mobius loop where one is the other is the one is the other is the one . . .

He showed a photograph of a shadow. Then a second photograph showed that the man in the photograph of the shadow-man was actually taking that photograph (you could see the camera in the second one) and then he told us that he was that photographing photographed shadow-man. And we talked about the 'difference' between the first and second photograph, and between both and the photographs with and without his narration. If we had found the first photograph, would we have arrived at the same conclusion? What is in the shadows? How do we embue those shadows with meaning? Or is it the shadow embuing us?

There was ancient Hebrew, and Greek, and doing and functionality, facer and fungi. It was lyrical, eloquent, affective and effective and affecting embodiment (chocolate, paper airplanes, incense, gagaku, "hiccup" music) of "interaffectivity." He took us on a marvelous journey, in many dimensions and with profound implications for New Media and for the human/machine interface. I love getting rid of that / . And I am especially taken with David's idea (and elegant formulation) that we are not "in the midst" but, rather, we are the midst. In NewMedia Res.