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from Section II - Second Introduction – A Series of Images and Signs
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 December 2019
Before a character can act, they perceive and are perceived by the world, and as such become affected by that world: the universe is encountered as a world of affects. Perception-images, in this way, pass immediately into affection-images. The two extreme limits of the affection-image correspond to – but extend and displace – the poles of subjective and objective perception: the human and ahuman. On the one hand, the affection-image is expressed by an embodied character, the face becoming the site of filmable external expressions capturing unfilmable internal intensive states. This is the icon, the expression of emotion and feelings. On the other hand, pure affects appear in the world through the any-space-whatever: a set, setting, or background – the mise-en-scene – which is encountered as an intensive force. With faces and landscapes the subjectiveobjective mapping of the perception-image is thus deterritorialised: ‘film treats the face primarily as a landscape’, write Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus, and ‘what landscape has not evoked the face …?’ (TP: 191). The icon and the any-space-whatever pass into one another via the transformational sign of the dividual – where world and the individual are exchanged and form a mass: affects of the crowd, the pack, the multitude.
The affection-image, accordingly, is constituted by the sign series: icon (first sign of full molar composition) ↔ dividual (secondary sign of composition) ↔ any-space-whatever (sign of genetic forces).
Icon
The icon is a close-up of the face (the face a close-up of the body; the close-up the fundamental condition of the affection-image). On the one hand, the face reflects a unity with the world it apprehends through perception. This is the expression of an affective quality. On the other hand, the face can express an affective desire. This is the power of affect oriented towards an impulse or an action to come, as a precursor and as yet unactualised. The qualities and powers of the icon are expressions of two sides of the intensive in-between of the sensory-motor trajectory (perception ← affect → action); the affect a centre of indetermination making determinations (perception = action) indeterminate (perception ≈ action).
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