Affects: Thinking Identities beyond Culture

My aim in this editorial is to propose an alternative model of identities in opposition to the culturalist account of identities in an attempt to (re) think notions of [cultural] identities through recourse to the idea of affects. (1) In a culturalist account, identities are often defined in terms of race, class and gender. And we have already produced numerous theoretical models to approach culture, politics and history, and their effectivity over the formation of subjectivity as effects of narrative seeing history "... as a kind of production of various kinds of narratives." (2) But here I am attempting to approach subjectivity from the idea of 'noncultural'/'nonnarrated' reality of affects, neither taking any airy transcendentalist turn nor adopting the point of view of any "misty crust" of cultural universalism, but rather from the position of Spinozian ethics of immanence. (3) My sense of 'noncultural' does not deny culture rather expands its horizon opening new fields for [cultural] individuations; rather helps to analyze the content and expression of culture. Additionally, I am also trying to introduce Spinozian view point of affects as a can-be new approach to analyze postcolonial/transnational bodies of literature. What is wrong with the representationalist account of cultural individuations? How can my alternative model of [cultural] identities save an idealistic/humanistic mission for society? These are the two major questions I am intending to address. To start with the first question, I disagree with the idea that who am I is based on in which ethnicity, in which nationality, in which political, religious, ethical systems I grew up. I am not a representation of the summations of these social and geographical abstractions, nor am I the effects of narratives under certain "regimes of power." I am a "pure, pre-extensive spatium in intelligible extension." (4) My intelligible extension is grounded in the real world where I encounter not the "clear and distinct" ideas or causations and effects of some conceptual abstractions that we call narratives of history, ideology, politics and truth but physical affects and affections (5) that my body produces with another body. And my intelligibility of the world cannot be adequately mediated either through any conceptual abstraction. I am my affective investment to the world. In other words, the content of my identity is not the idea of some conceptual abstractions, but rather the expressive power of my body. My body is an immanent force, which encounters other forces in the world and shapes what is in me and possibly cause to shape what is in others. I am a force, a new emergence within me all the time. That emergence is a purely organic process: an appreciative activity and organic vitality and it is affirmative will-to-create new individuations. I am not like "deorganizing the organic" (6) in any ossified representations. I am neither deorganic representation of any abstract stratifications that people name "culture," "history," etc., nor am I effects of discursive formation, as Foucault for instance thinks . I am the organic body not a de-organic formation of effects of some social production. Body is generative organism which creates affects and affections, which, even culturalist like Marcus admits, are structured around our social institutions. Body is not irreducible to any external disciplinary practices as Foucault maintains when he says: "True discourse, liberated by the nature of its form from desire and power, is incapable of recognising the will to truth which pervades it; and the will to truth, having imposed itself upon us [body] for so long, is such that the truth it seeks to reveal cannot fail to mask it." (7) For Foucault, my body is acted upon, and some external abstraction which he calls "discourse" acts. This is just Foucault in his later works does not believe, a point that supports my claim here. My body acts upon other bodies. In its active investment to the world, it either enters into compositional or decompositional relationship with other bodies. …