Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique, no. 31, part II (Autumn 1995): 83–109.
Brian Massumi’s
article in the
Cultural Critique represents
an attempt to conceptualize the affect as a category of research in social
sciences and humanities. This agenda leads Massumi to work on a very high level
of abstraction. This philosophical take on the affect resulted in a framework
which became quite popular in scholarly research: Google Scholar counted 467
citations for Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect,” and 2693 citations for his 2002
book
Parables for the Virtual, in
which this article became the first chapter,
an indication of its notable effect on academia. To a certain extent, the
popularity of Massumi’s ideas can be explained by the timely appearance of his
article at the very beginning of the affective turn, when it became a flagship
text for scholars in various disciplines to use in order to find new
perspectives on their disciplines and material. At the same time, Massumi
actively contributed to the conceptualization of the affect in Anglophone
scholarship by his translation of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s works. At
the same time, the high level of abstraction in Massumi’s work on the affect
leads to a somewhat speculative nature of his argument: in certain cases, the
absence or arbitrariness of his evidentiary basis left me sceptical to his
overall conclusions.
The understanding of the affect in
Massumi is linked to another key term in his research: the virtual. Massumi
understands affect as
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 (p. 96).
The virtual, in
turn, is linked to the human perception of external stimuli. To introduce the
concept of the virtual, Massum addresses a research which examined children’s
reception of and reactions to three versions of one film. Following the authors
of the original research who tried to understand and interpret the difference
between the reception of three versions of the film, Massumi argues that the
human reception of images (that is, external stimuli) occurs on at least two
levels: that of form/content, and that of intensity/effect. The form/content
level is linked with the signifying order; consequently, people are capable of
making sense of their perceptions on this level by narrativizing their
experience. In contrast, a perception on the level of intensity/effect is,
according to Massumi, “a nonconscious, never-to-conscious autonomic remainder”
of bodily reactions to external stimuli (p. 85). It is disconnected from any
possibility to being translated into a narrative: in Massumi’s gloss it is
“narratively de-localized” (ibid.). The relationship between the form/content
and intensity/effect level is that of the modified and modifier, in which the
latter remains invisible; it is only through traces that intensity/effect
leaves on the form/content level that we can feel its presence. Intensity does
not produce meanings, but is capable of changing them: “[i]t is a state of suspense,
potentially of disruption” (p. 86), which disappears at the very moment we
attempt to locate and describe it, but modifies the narratives we produce.
Massumi equates
intensity with affect, which allows for a radical differentiation between it
and emotion. While for him emotions are personal and belong to the domain of
the self, the affect is an extra- or intersubjective phenomenon. In lay terms,
a person can be emotional, but a thing cannot; at the same time a thing can be
affective (a rocket, an iPad, or a Chinese silk scarf), but a person cannot
unless she/he is objectified (the most extreme form being – visually – an image
or – materially – remains, such as Yorick’s skull). The affect lures in the
intersubjective space created by encounters between people and things; it is
hardly surprising then that Massumi finds the affect’s place of residence in
things:
Affects are virtual synaesthetic
perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing,
particular things that embody them… Actually existing, structured things live
in and through that which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of
affect (p. 96–97).
In contrast, an
emotion is the result of a conscious attempt at appropriating affect, a “consensual
point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed
progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and
meaning” (p. 88). Here, Massumi confronts Fredric Jameson’s definition of
postmodernism as “the waning of affect”: for Massumi, this definition is a
category mistake, a futile attempt to qualify the unqualifiable. Moreover, it
is politically dangerous, since the affect “is not ownable or recognizable, and
is thus resistant to critique” (Ibid.), a theme he more thoroughly addresses in
the second part of his article.
This
understanding of the affect – coupled with a visible influence of Deleuze in
Massumi – makes him occupy quite a radical anti-humanist stance in his writing.
Massumi suggests that, in order to produce accurate descriptions and
interpretations of social processes which would account for the structural and
structuring roles of the affect, scholars should radically abandon their
anthropocentric understanding of social reality:
Theoretical moves aimed at ending the
Human end up making human culture the measure and meaning of all things, in a
kind of unfettered anthropomorphism precluding to take one example-articulations
of cultural theory and ecology (p. 100).
The agenda of
Massumi thus resonates with “New Materialisms” of such scholars as Diana Coole,
Samantha Frost or Jane Bennett – the latter, like Massumi, also deeply
influenced by Deleuze’s understanding of social reality as a complex assemblage
which includes human and non-human agencies. For Massumi, the very possibility
of things to generate the affect, to overwhelm the rationality of human
consciousness, to shape human bodies and minds is the key to conceptualizing
the complexity of social process which various logocentric theories of
subjectivity and ideology – e.g., Jacques Lacan, Mikhail Bakhtin or Michel
Foucault – cannot account for (on p. 100 Massumi directly engages Lacan).
While Massumi’s
argument that the affect has an intersubjective nature is rhetorically
convincing, we have to take many of his claims for granted, as he often
neglects to provide an evidentiary basis for his argument. The claim that the
affect resides in objects is particularly fragile if we examine the difference
in reactions to the same object among different cultures (the scale model of
Yuri Gagarin’s Vostok spacecraft
during the class). The same object caused a different affective response in the
classroom – a phenomenon which is much better explained by Sara Ahmed’s notion
of affective economies. Ahmed argues that “feelings do not reside in subjects
or objects, but are produced as effects of circulation” (Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh
University Press, 2004), 8). From this perspective, affective objects are the
ones which were interpellated into the social being by emotions (Ahmed’s
vocabulary is apparently different from Massumi’s), rather than immanently
hosting affects as Massumi has it. The principle difference is in the cultural
relativism: Ahmed’s conceptual framework accounts for it, while Massumi’s does
not. The explanation lies, probably, in the fact that Massumi is more
interested in an individual’s encounter with the affect, which leads him to
prioritize psychological (that is, universal) aspects of this encounter over
cultural (that is, relativist). This is particularly evident in his discussion
of “the missing half-second.”
In his
discussion of the missing half-second, Massumi examines a psychological
research which established that there is a time delay between the perception of
an external stimulus and a conscious response. His interpretation of this delay
is that during this half-second, an individual is overcome with the affect:
The half-second is missed not because
it is empty, but because it is overfull, in excess of the actually performed
action and of its ascribed meaning. Will and consciousness are subtractive.
They are limitative, derived functions which reduce a complexity too rich to be
functionally expressed (p. 90).
The consciousness,
according to Massumi, is incapable of making sense of the body’s affective
response to external stimuli. This incapability to rationally deal with the
affect becomes a political resource in the post-modern era. In Massumi’s own
words, “Affect holds a key to rethinking postmodern power after ideology” (p.
104). Massumi is, in particular, interested in the phenomenon of Ronald Reagan
who, in his opinion, exemplified the post-modern use of affect in the
production of power relations:
Reagan operationalized the virtual in
postmodern politics. Alone, he was nothing approaching an ideologue. He was
nothing, an idiocy musically coupled with an incoherence (p. 102).
For Massumi,
Reagan’s performance in the political arena was post-ideological (or
non-ideological) – a claim that few historians would agree on. While Massumi
records the linkage between the affect and power, his interpretation of this
linkage is the least convincing part of the article. His claim that “[i]t was
on the receiving end that the Reagan incipience was qualified, given content”
is hardly something new after Roman Jacobson’s theory of communication
and Roland Barthes’s argument about the death of the author.
In addition, from a historical perspective, Reagan was neither unique, nor
inherently conservative (as Massumi frames it) phenomenon: Lenin, Trotsky or
Hitler, to mention just a few, used a presumably similar affective model of
communication with their audiences.
Massumi’s
article is an extremely interesting take on the affect theory. It does give me
new ways of thinking about the affect. His insistence that the affect can be
studied only symptomatically, by examining the traces it leaves in narratives
and meanings is particularly appealing. At the same time, from my (biased)
disciplinary perspective the universal and speculative character of his
approach is a major obstacle in using it for a history research. Unlike the
theories of affect which treat it as a social phenomenon, examine social dimensions
of the affect and differentiate between different affects, Massumi’s approach
to the affect does not give me methodological or conceptual tools to deal with the
affect as a historical phenomenon.
