Affect Notes

Intro to Affect:
Massumi, Ben Anderson, DnG, Cunningham, Clare Hemmings
Heterogeneous range of phenomenon, background moods, moments of intense
focus and involvement such as euphoria, visceral responses, as well as shared
atmospheres of people such as panic and eruption. Lifelong dedications of love,
neurological bodily transitions. Unlike emotion, moods, and feelings, affect is a state
of existence, a phenomenon that cannot be articulated through history, science or
means of empirical research. The affective turn is not new, it followed the statement
made by feminists of the second wave, the personal is political, echoing the
moments steadied or paved the path for new understanding of emotional life that
create the conditions or possibilities of politics. To pay attention to non-organic life
that we would not be able to have absent its study. Things that extend beyond the
body forming the value assumptions that we make.
Not useful to define affect, but only how it produces affects. To try to diagnose what
affect is goes against the thesis of affect studies alone, no single type or way it
composes itself but it is a structuring phenomenon that gives ways to lots of
different potentials. We can only see how affect produces different results upon the
world. How it is we are ushered towards war, how we invest in the war on terror,
subconscious functions. Value is generated and life is increasingly governed through
the biomediated body, managed and experimented on through media information
technologies and other affective psychopharmacologies.
Affect is more important for understanding power, even state power. Ideology no
longer explains how discovery, wonder, and means of practicing affect become
manipulated by the powerful. Politics is no longer just about words or political
statements, or even particular uses of language but more attuned to resonance,
collective feelings, and moods.
Massumi: Affect is the bodys capacity to affect and be affected. Where a body can
in principle be anything. The ability for some sort of thing or collective to assert a
sematic relationship with something else while also being influenced and/or
transformed by that very other things existence. To deny its existence destroys the
ability to learn more about the affective relationship. Exhaustion/worker, something
is both affected as well as can affect, the production has entered into an affective
relationship with the worker. Bodies are always imbricated in a set of relations that
extend beyond it and constitute it. Affect pertains to capacities of the body and the
possibilities the body creates for raw moments of existence rather than preexisting
processes of the body. It speaks to the capabilities of your body beyond constraints
of DNA and limitations.
Affirm the missing image of the picture that would make it complete. To look at art
in color and greyscale gives a different picture of the artist, we can see how every
stroke and movement of brush was either intentional or not. The patterns of things,
an example of an affective condition is greed, poverty, war. Mood that is imbricated
in the repetition of desire to continually accumulate. Affect is the prelinguistic
sensation, affective relationships refer to a mutual back and forth.
Object target- asks questions of affects such as consumer confidence or morality or
any value assumption, practices of knowledge, asks how affects are intervened in
and subjects governed by specific object relations. Particular understandings of a
place create specific things to be understood.
Bodily capacity- how capacities to affect be affected emerge, or change in the midst
of encounters. How do affective capabilities respond to affective relations such as
speech, how do those implicate the body. How do they contribute to the creation of
a metaphorical body.
Collective condition- how do things like political hope, infuse and resonate in
institutional practices, how nationalism forms the foundation for a pure war.
4 Things to Know about Affect:
1. No such thing as affect itself. No one affect, enchantment hope pride etc., can
serve as a model for affective theory or politics, there are innumerable affects
that are organized and patterned as a sociopolitical formation. Through
linguistics and movement of bodies, they form up environments. Form
landscapes before physical territories are created.
2. Affective life is always already mediated, emergent from specific material
arrangements that may be composed of all manner, bits, and pieces.
Geographies of affect will be a function of relational configuration, how it
enacts a particular description of a place are governed by the relationship
with the place. Uniqueness arguments, when people read cards that say
affect isnt real, affective life is always already mediated, you cannot divert
affective economies and relationships exist, just a question of configuration
to the sentimental economy/exchanges.
3. Affect is not reducible to the sort of collectives they emerge from. Never
autonomous, always already implicated within other dimensions of life
without being reducible to certain things. To say something is affectively
producing misses the fact that you are as much constituted as the part of the
affective relationship as it emanates from a source. Governments did not
instill fear within the other, but I instilled my own fears through an unhealthy
relationship with power. You cannot reduce an affect to part of one thing and
not another thing. Having the other being black can never be reduced to an
ontological question of the individual, it is a mutual interrogation or creation
of fear. Aspects of identity that just arent part of you, they extend beyond
you but they form you. Binary oppositions are bad.
4. Within affective collectives representations form elements of affect. By
paying attention to affect youre not precluding the way that reps operate,
but rather you are describing the means which representations function.
Affect is the prior cognitive phenomenon that regulates how we create
emotions. Process of internal desires that never enters the picture but
implicates how you draw the picture. Desire leads to affects, mediated by
material structures.
We see the way affect creates events. Power has not just discovered affective life,
not a governmentality or governments now molds public opinion through collective
feeling, always been the truth, just now that we realize it. Strategic bombing
involves the destructive capacity of the bomber and the vulnerability of the
bombed. Shape and mold the perception of power through a display of strength.
Apparatus or way of controlling prior to war itself, you rule by mood and fear.
Affects have accompanied the spatial way that war is enacted, the passions and
pleasures that come from a total war. The various attempts to regulate those things
through drilling soldiers, strengthen them in the face of the enemy, have all
contributed to the way that was happens on sematic lines, populations are not
simply individuals who get caught up in a pre-conscious autonomic affective hold,
but rather that populations themselves make up an entire affective structure that is
mobilized through warfare, any disruption of the psyche or the populous disrupts
the mobility of affect. Feelings are charges or intensities of affect, not types, but
only intensities.
Affect theory is good because it is concerned with how bodies come together and
apart rather than using principles of the unconscious that stem from biological or
social studies. Analysis or structures of feelings, affect textures and gives
understandings to scientific study. That creates a frame to which we can interpret
scientific studies, its more accessible.