Brian Massumi on Affect
January 2, 2020
This somewhat lazy post stockpiles a load of quotes I’ve pulled out of Brian Massumi’s paper The Autonomy of Affect (Massumi, 1995), which I’ve found extremely helpful for patching up some of the leaks in my own understanding of affect theory. I’ve left these quotes verbose to capture the context.
It could be noted that the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way. This is not to say that there is no connection and no logic. What is meant here by the content of the image is its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its socio-linguistic qualification. This indexing fixes the determinate qualities of the image; the strength or duration of the image’s effect could be called its intensity.
Intensity, Massumi says elsewhere, is being treated as synonymous with affect in this context.
The event of image reception is multi-leveled, or at least bi-level. There is an immediate bifurcation in response into two systems. One, the level of intensity, is characterized by a crossing of semantic wires: on it, sadness is pleasant. The level of intensity is organized according to a logic that does not admit of the excluded middle. This is to say that it is not semantically or semiotically ordered. It does not fix distinctions. Instead, it vaguely but insistently connects what is normally indexed as separate. When asked to signify itself, it can only do so in a paradox. There is disconnection of signifying order from intensity – which constitutes a different order of connection operating in parallel.
To identify a feeling as sadness is to qualify it as an emotion, and to ‘fix its difference’ from e.g. pleasantness. But since the level of intensity is prior to such qualifications these differences remain unfixed.
Both levels, qualification and intensity, are immediately embodied. Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin – at the surface of the body, at its interface with things. Depth reactions belong more to the form/content (qualification) level, even though they also involve autonomic functions such as heartbeat and breathing. The reason may be that they are associated with expectation, which depends on consciously positioning oneself in a line of narrative continuity. Modulations of heartbeat and breathing mark a reflux of consciousness into the autonomic depths, coterminous with a rise of the autonomic into consciousness. They are a conscious-autonomic mix, a measure of their participation in one another. Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-be-conscious autonomic remainder.
These distinct bodily reactions to intensities and qualifications are autonomous but interfering:
The relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification is not one of conformity or correspondence, but of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening. Linguistic expression can resonate with and amplify intensity at the price of making itself functionally redundant. When on the other hand it doubles a sequence of movements in order to add something to it in the way of meaningful progression – in this case a sense of futurity, expectation, an intimation of what comes next in a conventional progression – then it runs counter to and dampens the intensity. Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future. Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static – temporal and narrative noise.
Summing up the lessons of the first section:
Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguisitically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the expression event – in favor of structure. Much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory. The stakes are the new. For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox.
Next Massumi discusses the origin of philosophies of affect in Spinoza’s Ethics:
One of Spinoza’s basic definitions of affect is an “affection (in other words an impingement upon) the body, and at the same time the idea of the affection.”
In Spinoza, it is only when the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection that it attains the level of conscious reflection. Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, a self-recursion of the idea that enwraps the affection or impingement, at two removes. For it has already been removed once, by the body itself. The body infolds the effect of the impingement – it conserves the impingement minus the impinging thing, the impingement abstracted from the actual action that caused it and actual context of that action.
Spinoza’s Ethics is the philosophy of the becoming-active, in parallel, of mind and body, from an origin in passion, in impingement, in so pure and productive a receptivity that it can only be conceived as a third state, an excluded middle, prior to the distinction between activity and passivity: affect. This “origin” is never left behind, but doubles one like a shadow that is always almost perceived, and cannot but be perceived, in effect.
Linking Spinoza to Deleuze, and suggesting that they could both be read profitably (Bergson gets a look in here too) in relation to chaos and complexity theory:
Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is “selected.” “Phase space” could be seen as a diagrammatic rendering of the dimension of the virtual.
Then it’s Simondon’s turn (all these links to other thinkers and theories is one of the main reasons I found this essay helpful):
According to Simondon, the dimension of the emergent – which he terms the “preindividual” – cannot be understood in terms of form, even if it infolds forms in a germinal state. It can only be analyzed as a continuous but highly differentiated field that is “out of phase” with formed entities (has a different topology and causal order from the “individuals” which arise from it and whose forms return to it). A germinal or “implicit” form cannot be understood as a shape or structure. It is more a bundle of potential functions localized, as a differentiated region, within a larger field of potential. In each region, a shape or structure begins to form, but no sooner dissolves, as its region shifts in relation to the others with which it is in tension. There is a kind of bubbling of structuration in a turbulent soup of regions of swirling potential. The regions are separated from each other by dynamic thresholds rather than by boundaries.
“Implicit” form is a bundling of potential functions, an infolding or contraction of potential interactions (intension). The playing out of those potentials requires an unfolding in three-dimensional space and linear time – extension as actualization; actualization as expression.
Emergence, once again, is a two-sided coin: one side in the virtual (the autonomy of relation), the other in the actual (functional limitation). What is being termed affect in this essay is precisely this two-sidedness, the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other. Affect is this two-sideness as seen from the side of the actual thing, as couched in its perceptions and cognitions. Affect is the virtual as point of view, provided the visual metaphor is used guardedly.
This last paragraph has brought some light to something that has always puzzled me about affect theory. Sometimes affect is described in a very general sense (usually with reference to people like Spinoza and Deleuze) in terms of concepts like potentiality, capacities and virtualities. At others it is described in the more easily grasped sense of feelings (i.e. conscious events) prior to their qualification (often Lauren Berlant’s Cruel Optimism is invoked at this point). I never understood how potentialities were supposed to be identified with events. But Massumi provides some clarification: the Berlant variety of affect is a special case of the Deleuzian variety, the actualisation of potentialities in the perceiving organism from the perspective of that organism.
Elaborating on this:
Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage, are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the intensest (most contracted) expression of that capture – and of the fact that something has always and again escaped. Something remains unactualized, inseparable from but unassimilable to any particular, functionally anchored perspective. That is why all emotion is more or less disorienting, and why it is classically described as being outside of oneself, at the very point at which one is in most intimately and unshareably in contact with oneself and one’s vitality. If there were no escape, no excess or remainder, no fade-out to infinity, the universe would be without potential, pure entropy, death. Actually existing, structured things live in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect.
Our brains and nervous systems effect the autonomization of relation, in an interval smaller than the smallest perceivable, even though the operation arises from perception and returns to it. In the more primitive organisms, this autonomization is accomplished by organism-wide networks of interoceptive and exteroceptive sense-receptors whose impulses are not centralized in a brain. One could say that a jelly-fish is its brain. In all living things, the autonomization of relation is effected by a center of indetermination (a localized or organism-wide function of resonation that de-linearizes causality in order to re-linearize it with a change of direction: from reception to reaction).
Finally, Massumi steps back from the overarching theory to suggest some ways the order of affect plays out in pop culture:
Think of the image/expression-events in which we bathe. Think interruption. Think of the fast cuts of the video clip or the too-cool TV commercial. Think of the cuts from TV programming to commercials. Think of the cuts across programming and commercials achievable through zapping. Think of the distractedness of television viewing, the constant cuts from the screen to its immediate surroundings, to the viewing context where other actions are performed in fits and starts as attention flits. Think of the joyously incongruent juxtapositions of surfing the Internet. Think of our bombardment by commercial images off the screen, at every step in our daily rounds. Think of imagistic operation of the consumer object, as turnover time increases as fast as styles can be recycled. Everywhere, the cut, suspense – incipience. Virtuality, perhaps?
The ability of affect to produce an economic effect more swiftly and surely than economics itself means that affect is itself a real condition, an intrinsic variable of the late capitalist system, as infrastructural as a factory.
References
- Massumi, B. (1995). The Autonomy of Affect. Cultural Critique, 31, 83–109. [PDF]