Human Affect, Enchantment, and Mood
Sensorial and connective moments to our environment are dependent on our mood, which in turn, is often affected by our environment. Certain mood alterations generated by our surroundings might influence us to turn ethical principles into the practice of ethical behaviors. Jane Bennett makes many examples of this. The first is that of trash in a Baltimore sewer. The trash evokes certain emotions and responses within the viewer, ranging from disgust, to curiosity, to interest, which could result in moral choices: does one ignore what is in front of them? Examine it? Clean it up? Or react and deal with the source of it? She treats the trash as the actant upon us and our emotions, rather than seeing it as an object that we react to. In doing this, she gives objects an autonomy and history of their own outside of human interaction. By generalizing this principle, we begin to view nature outside of ourselves differently.
From Gilles Deleuze: "We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body... to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it...to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with in composing a more powerful body."
Jane Bennett: "If a set of moral principles is actually to be lived out, the right mood or landscape or affect has to be in place: Ethical Political Action on the part of humans seems to require not only a vigilant critique of existing institutions, but a positive, even utopian alternative - demystification works against these positive formations." 1