Toward a Continuous Field: Folded Subjectivities and Control in the Affective Networks of Upstream Colour

Shane Carruth's 2013 film Upstream Colour provides a model for considering identity and subject formation in what Steven Shaviro calls the “network society.” Shaviro argues that our contemporary mode of experience, at least as rendered through popular media, is characterized by “flows of affect” produced to hail us at every turn. Carruth's film offers the possibility that living in the network society means not only that we are subject to such flows, but that individuals are subject to invasive modes of fragmentation and commodification as producers of their own affect (in this case, memory and experience). Building on Shaviro's own definition of a network, I focus on how the mental connections forged between characters represent the nodal connections Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker say characterize network formation and behavior, and how the access rendered over those characters by the primary antagonist (referred to as The Sampler) works as a kind of “protocological control.” I then turn to Deleuze's theorization of the fold to discuss how new modes of subjectivity and relationality are modeled in the characters' phenomenological experience of these mental connections, in which distinctions of personal subjectivity and memory begin to blur and overlap. Finally, I return to Shaviro for implications of this model of experience, and to show how absorption in and by the network poses new possibilities for connection as well as potential for fragmentation and commodification.