Brian Massumi, The Autonomy of Affect

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,[1] 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[2] and Roland Barthes’s argument about the death of the author.[3] 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.

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[1] For comparison, Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion that I personally find more convincing from the analytical, logical and empirical perspective, has 2197 citations according to the Google Scholar.

[2] Roman Jakobson, “Closing statement: Linguistics and poetics,” Style in language, no. 350 (1960): 350–377.

[3] Roland Barthes, “The death of the author,” in Image, Music, Text (London: Fontana, 1977), 142–148.