Generally speaking, I find what I have read of Gilles Deleuze and Brian Massumi in the past very compelling, in addition to some of Silvan Tomkins’ and Eve Kosofksy Sedgwick’s work on affect theory. In Richard Grusin’s chapter “The Affective Life of Media” from his book Premediation: Affect and Mediality After 9/11, he states some problems with affect theorists that resonate with me:
I have developed the concept of the affective life of media not only to describe such emotional interactions with media as I have outlined above, but also to describe what Brian Massumi might characterize (following Gilbert Simondon) as the pre-individual circulation of affective potentialities among human, social, technical, and medial actants. With Massumi, I think it is important to resist the collapse of affect into individual emotion or feeling, a collapse that sometimes informs current work that goes under the broad rubric of “affect theory” and that reduces bodily and autonomic affect to a synonym for human emotion. But in focusing on the affective life of our media everyday, I also want to provide a corrective to Massumi’s occasionally mystical or romantic account of the modulation of collective affect, particularly in his thinking about the role of media in modulating the affective state of America after 9/11. Just as some cultural theorists tend to elide the bodily materiality of affect in reducing it to another term for emotion, so some media theorists sometimes tend to elide the technical materiality of media in focusing on the play of digital signification. (Grusin 118)
And later, he continues:
While Massumi would likely defend his lack of empirical evidence by pointing to the fact that collective affectivity might not be verifiable by forms of evidence that could be cited (people didn’t act similarly; bodies responded differently), this lack of specific examples detracts from his otherwise insightful account of post-9/11 mediality. (Grusin 120)
I think Massumi often evades empirical evidence, or uses it sparingly, for the same reasons Grusin critiques Rosalind Picard’s strictly quantitative research on affects: skin responses, heart rate, blood pressure, etc., only provide the amount of affect not its “degree” or “characteristics” (Grusin 114). And I believe that some have pointed out Massumi’s incautious use of empirical data in the past. Massumi argues elsewhere that the moment affect enters the realm of emotion, it enters a linguistic or conceptual cage and ceases to be affect (See Massumi’s “The Autonomy of Affect”). Indeed, this is the allure of affect: it’s resistance to language gives it transformative, renewing, non-conforming, and—dare I say—“mystical” power.
However, the difficulty I find here harkens back to William K. Wimsatt’s and Monroe C. Beardsley’s “The Affective Fallacy.” They write:
“…it is a well-known but nonetheless important truth that there are two kinds of real object which emotive quality, the objects which are the literal reasons for human emotion, and those which by some kind of association suggest either reasons or the resulting emotion:—the thief, the enemy, or the insult that makes us angry, and the hornet that sounds and stings somewhat like ourselves when angry; the murderer or felon, and the crow that kills small birds and animals or feeds on carrion and is black like the night when crimes are committed by men” (Wimsatt and Beardsley 50).
Their point being: one can’t identify emotions, only objects that have a tangible relationship to someone having emotions. For their purposes, they meant to say: one can read a text, but one can’t read a reader. Analogously, Massumi’s affect falls prey to the same critique. Massumi’s proclamations on affect assume a priori conditions for affect that resist any reduction to language or emotion. In this way, one cannot critique affect because it is only pointed at, hinted at, associated with linguistic units that are irreducible to affect. But back to Grusin’s point, measuring heart rate and skin responses paints an incomplete picture as well.
To be fair, it is likely that not everyone (Tomkins, Sedgwick, et al.) would agree with Massumi’s (metaphysical) version of affect, and many of them, even Massumi, probably provide their own responses to the affective fallacy that I have yet to read. I think it’s important to consider, as Grusin does well, that the focus should remain on the media that channels affect. Further investigation into the affective life of media, should Massumi continue to be a resource, must find a way out of the affective fallacy: how does one conceptualize the unconceptualizable?
Grusin, Richard. Premediation: Affect and Mediality after 9/11. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Masummi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique, no. 31, “The Politics of Systems and Environments,” part II (Autumn 1995): 83–109.
Wimsatt, Jr., William K., and Monroe C. Beardsley. “The Affective Fallacy.” The Sewanee Review 57, no. 1 (Winter 1949): 31–55.
Hi Dana - Thanks for your post. When you say that ’one cannot critique affect because it is only pointed at, hinted at, associated with linguistic units that are irreducible to affect,’ are you using critique as a synonym for falsify? That is how I understood you in context, and if that is what you meant, then I would like to gently push back. It is completely true that one cannot (or cannot easily) falsify a good faith affective reading of an event or a text. However, the value of affect theory as I understand it is not to declare what is the case in a way that is fully translatable/readable/provable within other critical frames, but to speculate in such…
Dana, thank you for this post. The Affective Fallacy is, I think, a really important obstacle that affect theory needs to tackle in my mind one way or another in order to convince me of its analytic usefulness. I agree with your skepticism of affect theory as, in a sense, objectless. And I wonder—what's the point of establishing affect as an ontological ground beneath emotion and feeling if we can never analyze its qualitative presence meaningfully and logically? As Gabe points out, empirical methods can measure affect quantitatively as biometrics, but like Franco Moretti's digital distant reading methods, this empiricism severely reduces the kinds of questions we're able to pose about our objects. What would it mean to understand affect…
Hi Dana, glad you were able to bring some of our classes together in summoning Whimsatt and Beardsley here, lol. It seems to me useful to look at affect studies within literary studies to deal with the tension you are identifying between the Affective Fallacy and Massumi/Grusin's ideas about affect. Remembering that affect is interpersonal and not summoned only within and from one person, affects would/should co-constituted with the texts themselves. So, for example, Heather Love's work in affective lit criticism (which is so good, btw) discusses The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall and the wide criticism and rejection of it by lesbian readers, how so many readers find it sentimental, pessimistic, difficult to get through etc. This is…
I think this post relates to the discussion we were having in group today about the "politics of dividualism"--though I know the Massumi reading your referring to isn't the same as the one in class. My group and I were perplexed as to how we are supposed to engage in a politics of dividualism if the kind of politics entails mobilizing or utilizing affect over the idea of choice or rationality as traditionally conceived. In my understanding, it would result in a cancellation of affect if we were to consciously attempt to "use" or "listen" to affect over rationality and choice.
I think this relates to the question of how to conceptualize the unconceptualizable...
My answer upon reflection in group…