Revising affect as a foundation of digital discourse

Abstract

Introduction. Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of affects found its further development in the works of the Canadian philosopher Brian Massoumi, who was engaged in popularizing the heritage of the French tandem of philosophers in the English- speaking environment. Massumi continues to explore society and man, based on the concepts of rhizome and the dominance of affective flows in forming social and political dimensions of people’s lives, as well as the coherence of the emergence of affect and the digital environment. Massumi argues that the influence of the affective on human behavior is extremely strong; it takes revenge on consciousness, the sensory-emotional sphere and the rationality of the individual. Breaking a single field of consciousness into many streams, Massumi postulates the initial splitting of the human psyche, in which he continues the schizoanalytic line of Deleuze and Guattari, who set this discourse in the latest Western philosophy. The purpose of the article is to answer the question: “Can a person become transparent in the world of numerical relations?” In the answers to this question, two main positions can be identified: a scientific view of a person as an incalculable and observable object and the idea of a person as an expression of unobservable subjectivity, his inner world, trans- gressed by imagination in self–cognition. Methods. The article analyzes Brian Massumi’s work from the view point of singular anthropology, which asserts the unity of consciousness, and also examines the genesis of affect from its description by Spinoza to the complexity theory of post-non- classical scientific discourse, a special place in which belongs to the phenomenon of an observer of complex processes. Scientific novelty of the research. The discovery of new optics, expressed in an appeal to subjectiv- ity and showing the insufficiency of describing a person exclusively with an objectified view of digital reality, constitutes the scientific novelty of this work. Results. On the basis of the thesis that it is impos- sible to identify a person by attributing his essence to a digital structure, there is a special attitude to anthropological reality as a unique event that is not included in the frames of the digital paradigm. Conclusions. Anthropological reality is based on affect, this is its territory, but there is no single definition of affect that would unite the often polar directions of philosophical thought. In this article, the author comes to the conclusion that Massumi’s attempt to fix affect on the EEG and present these results as a fact of finding affect in space reduces the concept of affect to the manifested electro- magnetic signals of the brain. While the affective field includes the non-objectifiable phenomena of dreams, emotions, and the supersensible. On the other hand, complexity theory does not exclude working with the latest phenomena, but still chooses flat ontologies and digital languages for describing anthropological reality as a philosophical guideline, which, in general, develops Massumi’s idea of human readability and transparency. But, unlike the above-mentioned approaches, Rus- sian philosophical thought asserts the reality of a person not in space, but in time, thereby offering to expand the range of optics to the very concept of affect.