Afteraffects: Capacity in the Wake of Capaciousness

  Capacity stems from a Late Middle English word that means “taking” or “holding.” These two verbs don’t usually appear as synonyms since taking is an aggressive or assertive act of pulling in, and holding is a defensive or solicitous posture of maintaining a state without overt change. Capacity, however, is precisely the state in which taking and holding converge, because the term embeds both a sense of a cavern or abyss–like a womb or other cavity–that can be filled when something is taken from the outside and put into it–and a sense of potentiality, since if that abyssal womb or other cavernous cavity is filled, capacity refers to the sense of holding what’s been received in readiness for release or action. Capacity is thus both void and potency, that which is formed as a hollow to receive and, after receipt, formed to enable ability.

In his analysis of Spinozan ontology and ethics, Deleuze famously asks “What must we do in order to be affected by a maximum of joyful passions?” (Expressionism in Philosophy, Zone Books, 273) The first step in an ethic that will produce and express beatitude is, he argues, the creation in oneself of more joyful passions. This is because ethics and salvation are not produced or expressed by actions but fundamentally by capacities.  Joyful passions, in Deleuze’s reading, are the capacities for joy, such that the taking of or being affected by more joyful passions results in a greater holding of or capacity for joy. Put differently, the reception of joyful passions, that is, the ability to open up one’s body and relations to joyful passions, comes over time to orient oneself to joy(fulness) or as C. S. Peirce might say to create the habit(s) for joy. The taking of joyful passions into oneself transforms one’s life by trans-forming the number, kinds, and qualities of relationship into which one enters and by which one’s self is formed (taken) and sustained (held).

At the end of his remarks that opened last week/end’s “Capacious: Affect Inquiry/Making Space” conference, Super-Aefftman*, Greg Seigworth put forth a vision for affect studies that resonates in affective affiliation with this dual sense of capacity as taking and holding, as the reception and production/expression of joy:

“I would like to believe that the journal Capacious and this conference are modest attempts at enacting such a thing: testing out other — more welcoming — ways to enter into scholarship, to build empathetic intellectual communities, to live an academic life that is not about claims to mastery and hyper-competitive one-down-manship but rather looks for the means to produce affective encounters and generative relations that will need to do something more-than-merely-sustain us through the ethno-nationalisms, kleptocracies and climate catastrophes that shape our existence in the present, for the future” (cut and pasted from Seigworth’s post on the Capacious FB page).

In an age when neoliberal tactics of debt, precarity, and hyper affect-management have seeded profound cynicism and distrust in all theaters of labor, including academia, Greg’s words are a balm, a charge, and a feasible ideal. The study of affect considers not just the goals of research or the whats and whys of life, but the hows, the emotional and sensorial measure of things. Greg’s words inspire us to turn our questions of how we do things–how we take and hold, how we produce and express–to all arenas of our intellectual, academic, and life endeavors.

I don’t have pictures of the conference because I was too caught up in it. I was like a resonance machine. But perhaps we can think about affect through this picture of Three-Mile Island that I snapped on my phone as the plane was landing in Harrisburg. Nuclear power starts with uranium, shakes up its atoms, and then splits them asunder in order to release energy. The process sounds neutral enough but the fission of uranium atoms creates waste that will still be on earth long after we humans have figured out how to finally kill each other off. Greg’s conferences–and his stated hopes for the joyful passions of affect studies–do something quite the opposite. They start with unpredictable encounters of people, art, music, walking, ideas, food, and arguments that shake up and pull threads of all of these things together into new and unexpected patterns. This fusion results in the heat of intellectual (and other) passion but does not leave us with toxic waste. Quite the contrary, it spools out into generative focus and fuel for further thought, further encounter, further….

In other words, it leaves us (capaciously) with capacity.

 

*I get the neologism “aeffect” from superthinker-writer-poet-rhythmicist, Fred Moten.

 

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Casa Roshell and the politics of trans visibility

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affect, Casa Roshell, trans identity, visibility

Casa Roshell (Camila José Donoso, 2017) is a 71-minute documentary about a trans club in Mexico City. Some of the customers and performers are transvestites and some are trans-identified. We hear them chat about shopping and boyfriends, and about their hopes or plans for gender reassignment surgery. All of the customers are caught in fraught and poignant webs of public presentation and self-understanding.

What is striking about this film is Donoso’s frequent decision to refract viewer access to these trans bodies through mirrors. Often she uses more than one mirror, as in the still above (I screen-grabbed these images as I streamed the film on Mubi). The body we see is ‘actually’ just to the left of the filmic space directly in front of the camera, but viewers see the back of the torso refracted (and inverted) to our right, and we see the face only by a mirroring of another mirror inside that mirror. The technique repeats itself too many times to be happenstance or even, I would submit, simply to signal a familiar trajectory of self-discovery and coming-out. (See Mubi’s writer, Laura Davis’s article, “Queering the Frame: Close-up on Casa Roshell“)

The image above of Roshell, for example, might be easily explained as an attempt to show her off in 3D, as it were, but I suggest that the accumulated affects of absorbing these multiply mirrored images contribute to another kind of cultural and gendered work. Consider the screen grab I showed initially, of the customer transforming himself into his herself, and the many images of Roshell, such as the one above,  in conjunction with quite complicated shots such as this one, below, which clearly must contain at least two mirrors…but which image of the blue-garbed woman is the mirrored image and which is the camera representation, or are both of them mirrored, indicating a body behind the camera?

The shots of all of these women–bringing to Casa Roshell many different careers, neighborhoods, and sexual desires– are intermittently but persistently supplemented with images of the club’s secure lobby, which evidences at least two surveillance cameras:

…and also images of non-transvestite and cis men who come to the club to dance and hook up with the women. These images are not always as starkly shadowed as this one, below, but they are all caught on camera by a starkly different gaze:

It has been a number of years since I read and taught David Valentine’s Imagining Transgender: An Ethnography of a Category (Duke 2007) but in watching Casa Roshell I recalled Valentine’s suspicions about reducing trans identity to a politics of recognition. He writes, “despite the differences and complexities of transgender politics, the logic of identity-based claims often silences that complexity, reducing the panoply of political arguments made by transgender-identified activists to the ‘recognition’ model” (272).

It seems to me that Donoso’s film shares this suspicion and uses the camera to insist not only on the “panoply” of identities and arguments to which Valentine points, but also the stark precarity of (especially) non-White trans bodies, their open vulnerability to murder. This latter is, in fact, what the editors of Trap Door: Trans Cultural Production and the Politics of Visibility call “the trap of the visual.” They write,

we know that when produced within the cosmology of racial capitalism, the promise of ‘positive representation’ ultimately gives little support or protection to many, if not most, trans and gender non-conforming people, particularly those who are low-income and/or of color–the very people whose lives and labor constitute the ground for the figuration of this moment of visibility (xv).

Instead of rebuking recognition or representation, however, the editors shimmy down into the heart of their paradoxes:

representations do not simply re-present an already existing reality but are also doors into making new futures possible. …Put simply, if we do not attend to representation and work collectively to bring new visual grammars into existence (while remembering and unearthing suppressed ones), then we will remain caught in the traps of the past (xviii).

It is this quite Hegelian “labor of the negative” that I see Donoso performing so beautifully with her camera. Mirrors do not completely usurp the narrative terrain of this short film, but they are regular enough to be felt as interventions or interruptions, conveying ‘upset’ to viewers who might want–Romantically–for Roshell and her customers to come to a stable and “achieved” sense of self. The film refuses this kind of self, and this fact also refracts in multiple directions: the lived truths of nonbinary bodies; the fluxes of gender or sexual “identities”; the Shangri la of a club that enables bodies to perform, practice, be, and play with who they are; and the real shortfalls of current trans and other justice-oriented activism that has yet to stem the tide of trans precarity and, especially, of non-White trans women’s murders.

From this POV, the security camera footage of the club’s dingy lobby, and the shadowy images of cis men who come to visually and sexually consume trans women seem to me to clang out punctuated warnings about the dangers of trans visibility. It is remarkable, then, that the overall feeling of the film is one of hope and promise, not the promise of happiness, perhaps, but the availing promise of a space which, like Dr. Who’s TARDIS (and yet real!), is bigger on the inside because it is saturated with profusions of positionalities and desires that dodge and tiptoe around its death-haunted shadows.