In chapter 1 Massumi talks a lot about levels of intensity of emotions by showing the example of the students analyzing the German film. He notices, oddly, that the students seem to connect the sadder images as being more emotionally pleasant. I was having a pretty hard time understanding why this happened so let me know what you all think or if it's even important at all.
Another part I found interesting was at the end of chapter one when Massumi connects affect to emotion. He says that although they are used as a synonym for each other "they follow different logics and pertain to different orders."
An emotion, Massumi says, "is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narratavizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning." Confusing definition, but I think it's saying that emotion is what defines our reaction to certain thing and what shows how we perceive the meaning of situations into some form of "action and reaction."
The difference between emotion and affect is that "affect is unqualified. It is not ownable or recognizable, it is thus resistant to critique." Help me out on this one guys, I'm not sure how it can be unrecognizable when your bodily actions show your affect to an emotion, Maybe I'm not looking at it right or not translating right, but let me know what you think.
I think one way it can be unrecognizable is through “the body without the image” concept that Massumi talks about in chapter 2. In my blog, I wrote about the concept of viscerality. Massumi explains that viscerality is when your body reacts before you brain tells it to react. An example he uses is when your heart stops before someone is about to touch you. The way I saw it was like it was a pre-sense to your senses. In this way, your body is reacting to something that is not ownable or recognizable. I am not sure if I am correct, but I think emotion comes into play when your brain finally processes the sense that came after the affect, and you are able to feel and say that you are scared/ nervous, etc. This would make emotion recognizable and ownable.
ReplyDeleteI think the "snowman" study is important because it illustrates Massumi's point that there is a gap between "content" and "effect." The study demonstrates that the two are not correlated in the way we would expect.
ReplyDeleteIt seems reasonable to hypothesize that the "most emotional" version of the snowman story would elicit the strongest physiological response in children, and be rated as least pleasant. Yet, that was not the case. The "factual" version was rated as the least pleasant, and the original, wordless version (not the emotional version) elicited the strongest physiological response in terms of skin conductivity, while the factual had the greatest effect on their breathing and heart rate.
So, content and effect are related, Massumi concludes, their relationship "is of another nature" than what we would intuitively assume... which leads nicely into his theories on movement, affect, and sensation.
I would check out Donah's blog for sure, because interoception ties into the "unqualified affect". I think this is why sometimes these knee-jerk reactions can be false, since they are unqualified. Your body just senses something and immediately reacts before even sending a message to the brain, because in the fast moving world, taking that half a second to cognitively process the information could be the different in a bug in the eye blinding you, or it just bouncing off.
ReplyDeleteI think Massumi's assertion that affect is "unrecognizable" is Massumi-speak for "emotion is the perception of affect." Just like we don't perceive sound itself, we perceive electrochemical "signals" when vibrations of tiny perceptive cells cause them to "fire" into our central nervous system, and up into the brain. We are somewhat divorced from the actual sound (vibrations through air, sound waves) that it could be said to be "unrecognizable", (except that we recognize it via an elaborate electrochemical process).
ReplyDeleteAnothe analogy for affect vs. emotion/feeling I've been thinking about is an electron microscope. Atoms are indiscernible, or "unrecognizable" or our senses. So to see REALLY little things, we have to shoot tinier things at them and see where they are bouncing off by registering where they land with sensitive equipment. The image you get from an electron microsope is a lot like a feeling, or an emotion. Its a representation of a real thing (an atom, an affect) that is itself imperceptible via direct sight. One problem with both is that it's not a perfect representation.