What: Abduction Narratives Part Six Affect as Conflict

Deleuze's five conflicts are based on relational affects, not cause-and-effect.  Developing conflicts using affect means there is a focus on character becomings, in the Deleuzian sense.

In Deleuze and Guatarri’s Thousand Plateaus they argue: “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body, or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body” (257). What D+G mean by “know” is via Ethos, not Logos or Pathos.  Ethos is the measure of affect.

Thus the ethos of various characters in Holiday influenced where the narrative could go.  There is a cause and effect plot: an old Russian mobster seeks revenge by setting up the abductor, Graham, for sharing a past with the Russian’s lover.  But neither the Russian, nor Graham, nor Anne, the young woman abducted, are on any cause and effect hero’s journey.  The story wrapped around that plot was created considering the ethos of the characters.  These characters are in a process of being affected, of becoming, as D+G state, “Affects are becomings” (256). 

D+G assert they know nothing about a body until they "know what they can do".  This calls for a certain kind of empiricism, that is, observation asking the question, "What does the body do?"  I used this to develop my characters asking the question: “What does the character do?”  What affects influence that character and what affective influence does that character have on the world around them?

What do they destroy and what do they align with?  Graham aligns with a machete and drugs.  Anne aligns with patience and speed.

This is a first step to building a story about injustice done without relying on a victim narrative.  The abduction of a young woman is certainly unjust, worthy of a righteous victim narrative, but does that ethos lead to anything except more violence?  Can we tell stories of personal atrocity that suggest another type of revenge?  A revenge of will, of not allowing that moment to destroy who the victim is, yet acknowledges the injustice, where violence is the last resort as opposed to the first choice?

Anne is a character becoming in a way that is life affirming.  Graham is a character becoming in a way that is destructive not only to those around him, but to himself.

Anne's ethos is her own best hope.  Yet even so, she is not a hero.  Whether she lives or dies makes no difference to the conflict between the Russian and Graham.

Nor is she the sole creator of her destiny.  She is connected to everything around her.  She exists in a context of affects, a place, landscape, environment that maintains its own affects and intensities that have no position for or against her.  She will ally with whom/what she must in order to escape—as well as destroy, affectively or physically, if she has no other choice.

In the conflict between her and Graham, she is combat, not war.  In the conflict between the Russian and Graham, she is collateral damage of no consequence.