Sur les traces du virtuel : de la nature et du rôle de la dimension affective dans le processus de communication
The present thesis contributes to the understanding of the affective dimension of communication. Experience is first considered as a qualitative duration, and thus as movement (Henri Bergson). The point of departing is movement as an intrinsic characteristic of the body. Thus understood, the body becomes a point of passage. What is it that passes through the body? Events. The body is constituted by this passage itself, which makes it into a becoming-body. Here, every experience is an act of communication in its purest state. Experience is an occasion for the actualisation of the virtual. It consists in the actualisation of a virtual force - which A. N. Whitehead calls the subjective form. The sense of the message is the event itself: that which emerges in the experience (Gilles Deleuze). Not the subjective experience of a preconstituted subject, but pure experience, as defined by William James: a relationality. That which actualises itself is an affective tonality (Whitehead), felt as an aesthetic quality. What are the constitutive factors of sense? The traditional duality subject-object must be enlarged into a relational complex: we can thus perceive affective, perceptive, human and technological actors in an assemblage that realizes itself as an emerging relationality. Every event is situated. Consequently, the emergence of sense becomes an act of co-creation in which the multiple factors conditioning the event participate. Who communicates? This act of co-creation communicates itself. This vision departs from an anthropocentrism to conceive the event itself as the subject of its own experiences (Whitehead). As much as every act of communication is a lived event, so too is every media experience. Event is embodied by the dimensions of the becoming-body – affective-consciousness and reflexive-consciousness. These are so intimately interconnected that they become mutually inclusive in experience and totally active in the actualisation of sense.
sens affect sensation relation virtual pure experience aesthetic event consciousness duration sense diagram