After looking at the first two chapters of Massumi, I am completely exhausted. He is describing affect, something that cannot be described really, since by his own definition, as soon as you give a label to an affect, it inherently loses its affect-ness, and becomes just an emotion. He tries to capture the entity that exists in the half a second after something is unconsciously felt but before it is consciously recognized, but he chooses language that frustrates me. Maybe I am just too dense to get it, but I think it would be much more effective for him to use plain language when describing something so incredibly abstract. The poetic language seems to be geared toward eliciting a certain affect in his reader, which proves his point, but my problem is that without having previously read Damasio and Brennen, I would have no idea what he was talking about. He writes at such an abstract level that yes, his affect was transmitted to me thus proving his point that affects do exist, but if his was the first work I read over the topic, the point would be moot. I would have felt the affect unconsciously, but not realized what he was saying - at lease in the first read. I think he would have been better off explaining his argument in more plain language, and rely on his examples to illustrate his point.
Now to what he was saying. Equally crazy. This is a whole new element to the motto of the Delphic Oracle. (Well I guess not since the notion of affect dates back to Plato and Gorgias.) Now, to "know thyself" and control what affects change you (borrowing from the Brennen conversation), a person must recognize unconscious events - "perce[ive] this self-perception" (36). (Sticks and stones may break my bones but affects will never affect me...?)
At this stage in the course I find it hard to take issue with Massumi's argument, since it is clear to me that affects to exist and play an important role in how a person feels, although it does not play an overwhelmingly influential role. Moreso I take issue with how he relates his claim, which I feel is a petty distinction.
I did find his inclusion of other fields (quantum mechanics, biology, etc.) very interesting. I have always been curious to see if mathematical and physical properties could be applied to feelings, words, etc. insofar as you could estimate their weight, momentum, rotation (changes in meaning - dogwhistles and the like), potential energy, kinetic energy, etc. in relation to each other and who is perceiving them. It has been a crank theory of mine, but it seems to work with Massumi as far as I understand him. Instead of feelings and words however, Massumi takes it even further to include the precursors of feelings and notions - affects.
I think someone in class was also interested in the issue you bring up in your first paragraph. Massumi seems to claim that language limits our thinking (hence, let's use/reinvent a bunch of words to break free of that) to that which we can give words. Since affects themselves lie outside the conscious mind but are perceivable via feelings, they tend to be pretty elusive.
ReplyDeleteBut what someone brought up in class (I really think it was Andrew) was what you were saying about "as soon as you give it a label... it ceases to be an affect and becomes an emotion." I thought of this, visually, like two sides to a fence. On the one side, we have the existing possibilities, the grid, the consciously known and culturally accepted. On the other side, we have the potentiality, that stuff outside the grid, for which we have no words.
Massumi says that our language limits our thinking, and his solution seems to be new language (like bringing affects over to the "grid" side of the fence, so that we can deal with them), but isn't Massumi thereby affirming the value of a grid? Wouldn't a better objective be to free ourselves of these limitiations, be leaving affects where they are (On the Other side) and trying to "jump the fence" ourselves by casting off the limitations of the grid?
I’m so glad you called Massumi out in your first paragraph. I know that Massumi intentionally used poetic language to elicit a certain affect, but his meaning was lost amidst the cluttered and convoluted language. Plus, he doesn’t have the excuse that Brennan had.
ReplyDeleteAnyways, I agree with what Gordan has written. There is a realm of experience that lies within describable language called emotion, and there is a realm of experience that exists beyond describable language called affect. Once you apply language to label an affect, it ceases to be an affect and turns into an emotion.