thank you, karin and michael for your thought-provoking comments. there are many things to say about this topic and the questions you raise. jameson's 'waning of affect' makes sense if one thinks of affect as emotion or feeling in the traditional subjective or collective sense. in that sense, our age is either wallowing in clichéd sentimentality or utterly numbed. affect, as I understand it, is a capacity or power of transformation. just as life or death don't belong to the person who undergoes them, affect is not a product or creation of a subject, but rather the network of forces that circulate around and through us while we are alive. In the spinozist sense, affect is rather synonymous with the vital force. and the affirmative sense both spinoza and deleuze impart to this is probably one difference between the way I understand affect and the way shaviro, it seems to me, understands it. i hope he can comment on this and clarify this point, which i've found to be a question that came up again and again as i was reading his brilliant book on post-c affect. so i now will segeway into the book just briefly and will come back to other things. for me affect carries a capacity for rupture (and also rapture) that i see happening in the works shaviro discusses in very sporadic and faint ways. but these few places where i can identify a strong affective component are interestingly those where shaviro finds an interruption of 'the reign of universal equivalence' that takes us 'outside the circle of capital.' that is how he describes the final scene in boarding gate, for example. but sporadic moments like that contrast with the more general trend to identify capitalism as a quasi totalizing process that extracts value from affect itself, a process where affect and capital come to be indistiguishable. if affect is taken to have the same equalizing value/effect as capital, is there any difference between the two? is there any need to speak about affect at all? i think at that point affect has become so utterly evacuated of any capacity for action that using the word itself is pointless. might as well just describe the devouring powers of capitalism for their own sake. what remains transgressive about capital's unremitting self-expansion? how can more of the same give birth to difference?

Hi Shane. Thank you for all your comments split into two parts, which totally resonate with what I was talking about. I find the metabolism idea very apt to describe affective processes. I am also in total sync with your comment on how we need to make the image itself a metabolic agency disengaged from human agency or consciousness. I've found sometimes when submitting a paper that speaks of the image as something that thinks, the editor wants me to change that to make it sound like it is the director's choices or whatever. I think that's really annoying because it totally misses the point which has to do with the autonomous process in which images engage regardless of what we mean or not mean. And to your point about exhaustion. The more I think about this, the more I see exhaustion is itself an affect, and not at all that which opposes affect. The exhaustion that bodies exude on screen has often a lot to do with the intensity that comes from changes/differences in speed, and what strikes me usually about these exhausted bodies is their deeply unconscious power to become the vehicles for forces and forms that to me speak of vitality far more than of exhaustion. I think there's a deep irony in images of exhaustion vis-a-vis this issue of affect and vitality. 

Hi Karin. I will try to reply to your two comments beginning here. Thank you for such a rush of ideas that literally jump off from the page. The clip that I posted is part of an 18 minute film that a friend and I put together some 5 years ago. The idea of making it came to me as I was falling asleep one day, probably because I was thinking of images in the films I was writing about in my book. You can watch the whole thing on Vimeo (it was uploaded by Cinephile, so if you enter Cinephile you'll find it among others. It's the one with a shot of sand/desert as the first image). Anyway, the most exhilirating experience for me in making this was to realize that I didn't have to make any decisions on where to cut or how to edit the sound, that the images themselves were deciding that. I know it sounds ridiculous, but for me there was no doubt about it. What we were looking for in the selection and sequencing of the images was the highest possible intensity in the changes between body speeds and patterns of movement. It was a bit like releasing the force of the body to the max, and I think your choice of the word 'release' or 'relief' is very appropriate here. Because this sequence has no psychological, moral, or representational content, the only thing remaining is the force of the body itself. This for me is a vitality that goes beyond the political at the same time that is traversed by the political and everything else. The political acts that impact this may revolve around either releasing this force (potentializing it, as Spinoza might say, composing a more powerful body by joining other bodies/affects) or repressing it, arresting it, obstructing it (although this may be an oversimplification, the state of exception that we permanently live in, as you put it, definitely works along these lines of decomposition and weakening of forces through exclusionary methods that purport to safeguard and maximize life, but actually release nihilistic forces of death such as war, or any form of fascistic repression. I think it's much easier to find resistant affects in art, definitely in cinema, than in the life we live outside art. Maybe art shows us the way.

Lynch's cinema for me is somewhere between the cinematic and the post-cinematic. One of the features Steve aligns with the post-cinematic is the absence of an 'absolute, pre-existing space.' Especially in his last films, Lynch never constructs such a referential space. Cinema is the space; there is nothing outside it as a real or transcendental ground. But what's interesting about Lynch is that although space ceases to have unity or solidity, the sense of duration is very strong. Maybe this is what separates it from the post-cinematic as Steve describes it through Grace Jones, Boarding Gate, Southland Tales, etc. In Lynch cinema is folded into itself and realism loses all meaning. But, as you say, this creates a power-surge of affect rather than its waning. What the example of Lynch makes me think is that the line between cinematic and post-c is much more diffuse and difficult to identify than one might think and that while one needs to look at specific cases, like Steve does, to be able to elaborate a theory of the post-cinematic, in practice this theory may undergo all sorts of changes, qualifications, and in a way, even a bit of scepticism towards theory as a unified system. But it goes without saying that Steve's work has bridged a huge gap in addressing issues about the transformations cinema is experiencing. In a way, he's telling us that we cannot go on pretending that things haven't changed, and that the cinema is still the cinema as if embalmed for eternity. This reminds me of a question I'd like Steve to respond to if he can: what do you think of the history of cinema as seen by Godard's Histoire(s) du Cinema? He talks about cinema as a living being with a childhood, adolescence, and maturity, even of its death, although he never envisions the kind of almost ontological shift that the digital brings about. Anyway, just to address Karin's last point, which I find one of the most amazing: you say that the images in the clip feel almost empty and that the affect is no longer resisting anything. Exactly. Either you take them all as resistant images (resistant to narrative, certainty, etc) or they are always already liberated from the cycle of action and reaction. This is a schizo-violence of free floating affects. It's a full emptiness. Like me right now. More tomorrow.