1 IFTR 2014 / Performance as Research working group Tero Nauha Schizoanalytic performance practice: affect relations and biopolitics 1. Affect, the capacity of relations Affect is a relation between potentiality and subjectivity. It is the capacity of making relations, which conjuncts the finite subjectivity with the infinite and a-signified matter of the potentiality. Thus, affects are not the potentiality, but the relation between subjectivity and potentiality. The capacity for affects in each subjectivity is limited, therefore the actualization of potentiality is always limited, also 1 . Affects are intensities, which appear as connections between the desiring- machines, whereas the desiring-machines do exist only in relation with an assemblage – consisting of concrete and abstract machines. Vivian Sobchack argues, that these affect relations are not autonomous, but cultured devices, which organize our sensorium. (Sobchack 2004, 68-69) The capital does not produce commodities, but “first and foremost […] capital relation.” (Lazzarato 1996, 137) While industrial subjectivity was ‘moulded’ into types, then the post-industrial subjectivity of biopolitical administration is in the process of modulation, which signifies general paradigm shift in the systems of production, governance and subjectivity. The pregiven, a-signified materiality of the potential is infinite, thus the amount of affects may be infinite, also. However, capital functions only on the limited condition and may not reach a full governance of the immanent reality. To my argument, in the context of the post-industrial, biopolitical administration, the affects as intensive relations are being administered, however, they are prior to any representation. The biopolitical administration functions through axioms, where affects are modulated or produced into efficient, a-signified ‘triggers’, which do not carry meaning, but may still function. Brian Massumi writes on affects as the constitution of the social assemblage, that: “[i]t must be borne in mind that affect, in the continually varying capitalist landscape, is an impersonal flow before it is a subjective content. […] Affect is an internal variable of the system.” (Massumi 1998, 60-61) 1 ”If we manage to produce active affections, our passive affections will be correspondingly reduced. And as far as we still have passive affections, our power of action will be correspondingly ’inhibited.’” (Deleuze 1988, 222)