Hedendaags affectonderzoek steunt sterk op #Spinoza [2]

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.”

Cf. ook
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]