Affect-studie
en affect-theorie is sinds medio 1990-iger jaren een apart onderzoeksterrein
geworden, waarin veel op Spinoza wordt teruggegrepen.
Brian Massumi staat aan het begin van de ‘affective turn’ in
de jaren ’90, en hij baseerde zich sterk op Spinoza.
Brian Massumi (born 1956) is a Canadian philosopher
and social theorist. Massumi's research spans the fields of art, architecture,
cultural studies, political theory and philosophy. His work explores the
intersection between power, perception, and creativity to develop an approach
to thought and social action bridging the aesthetic and political domains. He
is a retired professor in the Communications Department of the Université de
Montréal. [wiki]
Hij
is vertaler van o.a. Gilles Deleuze en Félix Guattari en via hen baseert hij
zich in veel van zijn werk op Spinoza. En m.n. op diens filosofie over het
affect. Het begon met zijn
● Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect.” In: Cultural Critique, No. 31, The Politics
of Systems and Environments, Part II. (Autumn, 1995), pp. 83-109. [cf. html] [PDF]
In
dat essay maakte hij een onderscheid tussen affect (lichaamsreacties) en emotie
(gevoel en cognitief bewustzijn daarvan – zeg maar the afterthought). Hij
schrijft daarin op blz. 92 en 93:
“One of
Spinoza's basic definitions of affect is an "affection of (in other words
an impingement upon) the body, and at the same time the idea of the
affection." This starts sounding suspiciously Bergsonian if it is noted
that the body, when impinged upon, is described by Spinoza as being in a state
of passional suspension in which it exists more outside of itself, more in the
abstracted action of the impinging thing and the abstracted context of that
action, than within itself; and if it is noted that the idea in question is not
only not conscious but is not in the first instance in the "mind."
In
Spinoza, it is only when the idea of the affection is doubled by an idea of the idea of the affection that it attains the level of conscious
reflection. Conscious reflection is a doubling over of the idea on itself, a
self-recursion of the idea that enwraps the affection or impingement, at two
removes. For it has already been removed once, by the body itself. The body
infolds the effect of the
impingement-it conserves the impingement minus the impinging thing, the
impingement abstracted from the actual action that caused it and actual context
of that action. This is a first-order idea produced spontaneously by the body:
the affection is immediately, spontaneously doubled by the repeatable trace of
an encounter, the "form" of an encounter, in Spinoza's terminology
(an infolding, or contraction, of context in the vocabulary of this essay). The
trace determines a tendency, the potential, if not yet the appetite, for the
autonomic repetition and variation of the impingement. Conscious reflection is
the doubling over of this dynamic abstraction on itself. The order of
connection of such dynamic abstractions among themselves, on a level specific
to them, is called mind. The autonomic tendency received second-hand from the
body is raised to a higher power to become an activity of the mind. Mind and
body are seen as two levels recapitulating the same imagelexpression event in
different but parallel ways, ascending by degrees from the concrete to the
incorporeal, holding to the same absent center of a now spectral-and
potentialized-encounter. Spinoza's Ethics is the philosophy of the
becoming-active, in parallel, of mind and body, from an origin in passion, in
impingement, in so pure and productive a receptivity that it can only be
conceived as a third state, an excluded middle, prior to the distinction
between activity and passivity: affect. This "origin" is never left
behind, but doubles one like a shadow that is always almost perceived, and
cannot but be perceived, in effect.”
Sherman Tan schrijft daarover in “Anthropology of
Emotions - Review of Sources – 2” [academia.edu]:
“The publication of Brian Massumi’s paper, “The Autonomy of Affect” (Massumi 1995), represents a “watershed moment” in the development and intensification of research agendas oriented towards theories of affect, as well as with regards to the “displacement of the centrality of cognition” and of “structuralism and poststructuralism” in the social sciences (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 5). This seminal paper, as well as his more recent work on the affective dimensions of fear (and threat) in a post 9/11 context (Massumi 2005), should be viewed together as an overall (and ongoing) effort to elaborate and/or operationalize the paradigm of affect in cultural critique. In this critical summary, I will attempt to identify and explain a number of common themes which run through this body of “affect theory” and which are central to the “affective turn” in the social sciences. At the same time, I hope to establish certain critical concerns which coincide with this body of work and trace out the intellectual indebtedness of “affect theory” to particular ideas in neuroscience and developmental psychology, while keeping in mind specific and significant trajectories of resistance against these theorizations of affect.”
“The publication of Brian Massumi’s paper, “The Autonomy of Affect” (Massumi 1995), represents a “watershed moment” in the development and intensification of research agendas oriented towards theories of affect, as well as with regards to the “displacement of the centrality of cognition” and of “structuralism and poststructuralism” in the social sciences (Seigworth and Gregg 2010: 5). This seminal paper, as well as his more recent work on the affective dimensions of fear (and threat) in a post 9/11 context (Massumi 2005), should be viewed together as an overall (and ongoing) effort to elaborate and/or operationalize the paradigm of affect in cultural critique. In this critical summary, I will attempt to identify and explain a number of common themes which run through this body of “affect theory” and which are central to the “affective turn” in the social sciences. At the same time, I hope to establish certain critical concerns which coincide with this body of work and trace out the intellectual indebtedness of “affect theory” to particular ideas in neuroscience and developmental psychology, while keeping in mind specific and significant trajectories of resistance against these theorizations of affect.”
Cf. ook
Nora E Rossbach, A Repositioning of Massumi's " Autonomy of Affect " in Terms of Cybernetic Theory [academia.edu]
Nora E Rossbach, A Repositioning of Massumi's " Autonomy of Affect " in Terms of Cybernetic Theory [academia.edu]
Dit
artikel nam hij als eerste hoofdstuk op na zijn Introduction in zijn
● Brian Massumi, Parables
for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke University Press – books.google
In de Introduction lezen we:
Brian
Massumi is vele malen geïnterviewd en in vele van de interviews verwijst hij
naar Spinoza. Recent nog in het interview in de Los Angeles Review of Books.
Dat werd de aanleiding voor
mij om naar meer over Massumi op zoek te gaan. Het uitgebreidst spreekt hij
over Spinoza en affect in het interview dat Mary Zournazi in 2002 met hem had
en dat in meerdere boeken werd opgenomen en waarvan de tekst op archive.org is geplaatst (ook hier te vinden). In het boek
● Brian Massumi, Politics
of Affect [John Wiley & Sons, 2015], dat in feite een bundel interviews
is, is het eerste dat van Mary Zournazi met hem.
Het
PDF van dat boek werd op internet geplaatst; cf. ook
het review door Loren Cressler [Academia.edu]. Uit dat lange interview van Mary
Zournazi, haal ik hier - om een idee te geven - een stukje naar binnen.
Brian Massumi:
[…] To get from affect to intensity
you have to understand affect as something other than simply a personal
feeling. By 'affect' I don't mean 'emotion' in the everyday sense. The way I
use it comes primarily from Spinoza. He talks of the body in terms of its
capacity for affecting or being affected. These are not two different
capacities — they always go together. When you affect something, you are at the
same time opening yourself up to being affected in turn, and in a slightly
different way than you might have been the moment before. You have made a
transition, however slight. You have stepped over a threshold. Affect is this
passing of a threshold, seen from the point of view of the change in capacity.
It's crucial to remember that Spinoza uses this to talk about the body. What a
body is, he says, is what it can do as it goes along. This is a totally
pragmatic definition. A body is defined by what capacities it carries from step
to step. What these are exactly is changing constantly. A body's ability to affect
or be affected — its charge of affect — isn't something fixed.
So depending on the circumstances, it goes up and down
gently like a tide, or maybe storms and crests like a wave, or at times simply
bottoms out. It's because this is all attached to the movements of the body
that it can't be reduced to emotion. It's not just subjective, which is not to
say that there is nothing subjective in it. Spinoza says that every transition
is accompanied by a feeling of the change in capacity. The affect and the feeling
of the transition are not two different things. They're two sides of the same
coin, just like affecting and being affected. That's the first sense in which
affect is about intensity — every affect is a doubling. The experience of a
change, an affecting-being affected, is redoubled by an experience of the
experience. This gives the body's movements a kind of depth that stays with it
across all its transitions — accumulating in memory, in habit, in reflex, in
desire, in tendency. Emotion is the way the depth of that ongoing experience
registers personally at a given moment.
Mary Zournazi: Emotion, then, is only a limited expression of the
'depth' of our experience?
Brian Massumi: Well, an emotion is a very partial expression of
affect. It only draws on a limited selection of memories and only activates
certain reflexes or tendencies, for example. No one emotional state can
encompass all the depth and breadth of our experiencing of experiencing — all
the ways our experience redoubles itself. The same thing could be said for
conscious thought. So when we feel a particular emotion or think a particular
thought, where have all the other memories, habits, tendencies gone that might
have come at the point? And where have the bodily capacities for affecting and
being affected that they're inseparable from gone? There's no way they can all
be actually expressed at any given point. But they're not totally absent
either, because a different selection of them is sure to come up at the next
step. They're still there, but virtually — in potential. Affect as a whole,
then, is the virtual copresence of potentials.
This is the second way that affect has to do with
intensity. There's like a population or swarm of potential ways of affecting or
being affected that follows along as we move through life. We always have a
vague sense that they're there. That vague sense of potential, we call it our
'freedom', and defend it fiercely. But no matter how certainly we know that the
potential is there, it always seems just out of reach, or maybe around the next
bend. Because it isn't actually there — only virtually. But maybe if we can
take little, practical, experimental, strategic measures to expand our
emotional register, or limber up our thinking, we can access more of our potential
at each step, have more of it actually available. Having more potentials
available intensifies our life. We're not enslaved by our situations. Even if
we never have our freedom, we're always experiencing a degree of freedom, or
'wriggle room'. Our degree of freedom at any one time corresponds to how much
of our experiential 'depth' we can access towards a next step — how intensely
we are living and moving.
Once again it's all about the openness of situations
and how we can live that openness. And you have to remember that the way we
live it is always entirely embodied, and that is never entirely personal — it's
never all contained in our emotions and conscious thoughts. That's a way of
saying it's not just about us, in isolation. In affect, we are never alone.
That's because affects in Spinoza's definition are basically ways of
connecting, to others and to other situations. They are our angle of
participation in processes larger than ourselves. With intensified affect comes
a stronger sense of embeddedness in a larger field of life — a heightened sense
of belonging, with other people and to other places. Spinoza takes us quite
far, but for me his thought needs to be supplemented with the work of thinkers
like Henri Bergson, who focuses on the intensities of experience, and William
James, who focuses on their connectedness.
Van
zijn vele boeken noem ik er hier slechts nog de volgende:
● Brian Massumi, What
Animals Teach Us about Politics. Duke University Press, 2014 – books,google
● Brian
Massumi, The Principle of Unrest:
Activist Philosophy in the Expanded Field. London: Open Humanities Press,
2017
In het volgend blog zal blijken dat Massumi ook kritiek ondervindt inzake zijn lezing van Spinoza. Hier vermeld ik alvast een van de meest diepgaande kritieken, n.l. van
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” in: Critical Inquiry, Vol 37 [Spring 2011], pp. 434-472 [desgewenst te vinden op Book SC]
In het volgend blog zal blijken dat Massumi ook kritiek ondervindt inzake zijn lezing van Spinoza. Hier vermeld ik alvast een van de meest diepgaande kritieken, n.l. van
Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” in: Critical Inquiry, Vol 37 [Spring 2011], pp. 434-472 [desgewenst te vinden op Book SC]
De conclusie van Ruth Leys laat volgens mij goed zien dat filosofen beter wegblijven van wetenschap om hun coordinaten te funderen.
BeantwoordenVerwijderenSpinoza's conatus, Freuds onbewuste en Deleuze's Sense zijn vooropstellingen als axioms om hun denken sluitend te maken.
Je vindt geen neurologisch correlatie voor conatus, net zo min voor het onbewuste of voor Sense.