A Political Ontology of the Affective Image in India
www.thecine-files.com A Political Ontology of the Affective Image in India Amit S. Rai The embodiment of media in postcolonial cities returns us to the project of an ontology of the affective image. In these contexts of global and local relations of power and mechanisms of value extraction, questions of bodily intensities, techno-perceptual assemblages, and urban piracy infrastructures insistently pose the question of the ontological relations of image ecologies. Recall that, for Bergson, an image is half-way between a representation and a thing, and if it has a “life,” it is through the temporal and material correlation of non-coinciding resonant unities, or moving wholes, which could be durations, a neural network, or assemblages of assemblages, or many other things besides. In diagramming practices of the image as sensory motor circuits in ecological feedback with assemblages of matter, bacteria, speed, and technology (and so on), what is at stake for the question of a method of experiments in affect? Here I want to turn to the collective assemblages of these experiments, and consider their political ontologies. One of the great challenges of Gilles Deleuze’s work on affect is to resituate the question of the political ontology of capital, what Massumi calls its specific ontopower.1 Hence, if affect is autonomous, one line of flight for this multiplicity is the political itself. In this short piece, I would like to follow the autonomy in affect through a consideration of political subjectivity in a film about media piracy in Mumbai, Videokaaran (2011).2 Jagannathan Krishnan’s Videokaaran begins with a scene of a get together between working class male fans of Indian cinema.
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