Okay, first let me admit that initially I find this article nearly impossible to read. WTH. I suppose that speaks to my lack of initiation into the conversation. Sigh. So many conversations. So little time…
That said, I find this: “Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin-at the surface of the body, at its interface with thing” (85). **This word “purely” has me wondering. What does ‘purely’ mean here? subconscious? unconscious? Even the sub- and un- conscious events, aka “autonomic responses,” are shaped by signification, language, pasts, memories, etc. Of course, right? So I’m wondering what Massumi means by ‘purely’ here.
“Modulations of heartbeat and breathing mark a reflux of consciousness into the autonomic depths, coterminous with a rise of the autonomic into consciousness. They are a conscious-autonomic mix, a measure of their participation in one another [Ineinandersein]. Intensity is beside that loop, a nonconscious, never-to-conscious autonomic remainder. It is outside expectation and adaptation, as disconnected from meaningful sequencing, from narration, as it is from vital function. It is narratively delocalized, spreading over the generalized body surface, like a lateral backwash from the function-meaning interloops traveling the vertical path between head and heart” (85). ***Goodness. What is this ‘intensity’ he speaks of? From whence this ‘purity’? This disconnection? On what basis? And honestly this simile doesn’t help me. Why “vertical path”? What is he analyzing here? I’m trying to find a connection between this theorizing and the ’empirical’ study of children at the start of the article, the findings of which suggested that the children valued sensation—even sadness—over non-sensational experience via language.
Oh, okay… Now I see it. “Their study was notable for failing to find much of what it was studying: cognition” (83). This article, this thinking, this ‘study’ (as reported here) builds upon the notion that there exists a distinction between cognition and emotion. The study puts ‘language’ in the category of ‘cognition.’ Massumi, via this article, demonstrates language as a part of ’emotion’? Casuistry indeed. But Massumi studies Peirce and Whitehead…
Of course this study, in order to gain insight into children’s emotional stimulation, might have just asked the children and recorded and analyzed their linguistic (or other kind of) responses. Why did they put language to the film? The voiceovers, seems to me, interfere dramatically with the supposed goal of the study (which we can’t really know via Massumi, I guess). Tone is difficult always. Who knows if a child’s response to “matter of fact tone inspires memories of grief?
“Researchers, headed by Hertha Sturm, used three versions of the film: the original wordless version and two versions with voice- overs added. The first voice-over version was dubbed “factual.” It added a simple step-by-step account of the action as it happened. A second version was called “emotional.” It was largely the same as the “factual” version, but included at crucial turning points words expressing the emotional tenor of the scene under way” (83).
“The children, it turns out, were physiologically split: factuality made their heart beat faster and deepened their breathing, but it made their skin resistance fall. The original nonverbal version elicited the greatest response from their skin. Galvanic skin response measures autonomic reaction” (83). **Okay. But what is meant by ‘autonomic’? Is that supposed to be a ‘purely physical,’ uninformed instinctual response? According to wikipedia at least… the heartbeat response and breathing response is also ‘autonomic’? What’s the distinction here, I wonder…
“Accepting and expanding upon that, it could be noted that the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way” (84). **AH, here is Peirce. Here is a ‘third’-ing.
“What is meant here by the content of the image is its indexing to conventional meanings in an intersubjective context, its sociolinguistic qualification” (84). **”Indexing”… How an image is meaningful (elicits any response whatsoever). The connections a person makes (autonomically?) when perceiving the image
“This indexing fixes the quality of the image; the strength or duration of the image’s effect could be called its intensity” (84-85). **”Quality here = meaningfulness? So the effect is physiological, but not ‘purely’… Right?
“What comes out here is that there is no correspondence or conformity between quality and intensity. If there is a relation, it is of another nature (85). **Okay. What’s he saying here? “conformity” ? On what basis? Is he saying that an image might “be” very meaningful to someone but the physiological response elicited by the image could be of low intensity? And vice versa?
“To translate this negative observation into a positive one: the event of image reception is multi-leveled, or at least bi-level. There is an immediate bifurcation in response into two seemingly autonomous systems [One somehow operating free of signification; ‘pure’ experience, ‘pure’ body]. One, the level of intensity, is characterized by a crossing of semantic wires [so… not free of signification?]: on it, sadness is pleasant. The level of intensity is organized according to a logic that does not admit of the excluded middle [Peirce]. This is to say that it is not semantically or semiotically ordered [But it can’t be semiotically free or distinct or purified of semiotics]. It does not fix distinctions [what does this mean?]. Instead, it vaguely but insistently connects what is normally indexed as separate. When asked to signify itself, it can only do so in a paradox. There is disconnection of signifying order from intensity-which constitutes a different order of connection operating in parallel. The gap noted earlier is not only between content and effect. It is also between the form of content—signification as a conventional system of distinctive difference—and intensity. The disconnection between form/content and intensity/effect is not just negative: it enables a different connectivity, a different difference, in parallel” (85). **WTH does this mean? I don’t know. But you’d have to believe it to buy into ‘affect theory.’
“Both levels, qualification and intensity, are immediately em- bodied. Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin-at the surface of the body, at its interface with thing” (86). BUT YOUR SKIN DOESN”T TOUCH AN IMAGE!!??? WTH
“Depth reactions belong more to the form/ content (qualification) level, even though they also involve autonomic functions such as heartbeat and breathing. The reason may be that they are associated with expectation, which depends on consciously positioning oneself in a line of narrative continuity” (86). Really? I know lots of people who ‘expect’ and anticipate without consciously doing so. Like when I catch myself, in mom mode, saying, ‘don’t swing the club in the house, you’ll break a window or a nose or something.’ I’m sure this is “conscious” because it is put to language, right? Oh brother.
“The qualifications of emotional content enhanced the images’ effect, as if they resonated with the level of intensity rather than interfering with it. An emotional qualification breaks narrative continuity for a moment to register a state—actually re-register an already felt state (for the skin is faster than the word)” (86). **OMG I need coffee. [pauses to get coffee]. But but but… the “qualifications” are linguistic, sonic, semiotic. The image itself is semiotic? I don’t understand how the study comes to make a distinction between two kinds of ‘autonomic’ responses, which seems to be happening here.
“Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear processes: resonation and feedback which momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future. Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static-temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption. It’s like a temporal sink, a hole in time, as we conceive of it and narrativize it. It is not exactly passivity, because it is filled with motion, vibratory motion, resonation” (86). *** So “intensity” is a physiologically manifested point in time (disconnected, independent)? How can there be resonance and feedback without time? Okay… maybe there’s a state, call it ‘an emotional state’ that is full of a kind of potential, potential defined by…?
Is this language shackled by a positivistic notion of social/personal? ” Of course the qualification of an emotion is quite often, in other contexts, itself a narrative element that moves the action ahead, taking its place in socially recognized lines of action and reaction” (87).
“Language belongs to entirely different orders depending on which redundancy it enacts [how can language be a ‘mere’ redundancy? TRANSLATION IS ALWAYS AN ASPECT OF LANGAUGE!!! Is he saying that if translation doesn’t isn’t detectable in skin response or other physical actions/shift then its just redundant?] Or, it always enacts both more or less completely: two languages [what? whose language? the subject? what?], two dimensions of every expression, one superlinear, the other linear. Every event takes place on both levels-and between both levels, as they themselves resonate to form a larger system composed of two interacting subsystems following entirely different rules of formation [bullshit]. For clarity, it might be best to give different names to the two halves of the event. In this case: suspense could be distinguished from and interlinked with expectation, as superlinear and linear dimensions of the same image-event, which is at the same time an expression-event” (87). Okay. WTF. LANGUAGE IS SEMIOTIC. We aren’t talking about semiotics? I’m not dumb, and yet this article… hates me.
“Approaches to the image in its relation to language are incomplete if they operate only on the semantic or semiotic level, however that level is defined (linguistically, logically, narratologically, ideologically, or all of these in combination, as a Symbolic). What they lose, precisely, is the expression event-in favor of structure. Much could be gained by integrating the dimension of intensity into cultural theory. The stakes are the new. For structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules. Nothing is prefigured in the event. It is the collapse of structured distinction into intensity, of rules into paradox” (87). **Dear self, I realize that you don’t believe Massumi when he intimates that there is some distinct, separate, always immediate emotional state, full of potential because its an unfettered “structure” (unfettered by… time? memory? consciousness? the rules of language and semiotics?) What the hell is “the expression event”? But I don’t believe. Can I try? Yes. I will try to believe him.
“Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure [He means still dyadic/positivist] even across irreconciliable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence of a signifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism. [But what about Peirce and Whitehead? not deconstructivists, not structuralists formally] Affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion. But one of the clearest lessons of this first story is that emotion and affect- if affect is intensity-follow different logics and pertain to different orders” (88). ***Okay, so “affect” refers to the physiological response underlying emotion? It is separate in that it operates by different ‘rules’ or processes than does emotion tied to language?
“An emotion is a subjective content [if it is a content, if it is ‘qualified’ by the subject, then emotion is in-formed by the social], the socio-linguistic 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 narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. If some have the impression that it has waned, it is because affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable, and is thus resistant to critique” (88). ***So is affect a physiological point of potentiality? potentiality towards meaning and emotion. A point formed by/delimited in a body (with history) in a place at a time?
And then Spinoza. Affect. Ethics (89)
“If the cortical electrode was fired a half-second before the skin was stimulated, patients reported feeling the skin pulse first. The researcher speculated that sensation involves a “backward referral in time”-in other words, that sensation is organized recursively before being linearized [this is the mind doing, just doing differently from linearized doing; Peircean, this recursivity?], before it is redirected outwardly to take its part in a conscious chain of actions and reactions” (89). **Okay. So let’s say there is a level of experience untouched by consciousness (which requires signification/interpretation). These two (and this is Nelson’s point?) are not mutually exclusive. What I find interesting is this notion of “time” and the experience of time, which must be “reported,” an act of signification.
“Brain and skin form a resonating vessel [Dialogic bouncing]. Stimulation turns inward, is folded into the body [I imagine a tuning fork], except that there is no inside for it to be in, because the body is radically open [what does this mean? it is ‘open’ but still delimited, ‘radically delimited’], absorbing impulses quicker than they can be perceived [perception is an act of mind here, not body; ‘absorbing impulses’ is the act of body], and because the entire vibratory event is unconscious, out of mind. Its anomaly is smoothed over retrospectively to fit conscious requirements of continuity and linear causality” (90). **Okay THIS is interesting! But what’s with ‘anomaly’? If this is a state of being then it is utterly normal. Even in its non-linearity. Does language require linearity to be meaningful? Why can’t we adopt this metaphor of vibratory resonance with language and other meaning systems, too? What would it do to our thinking and our practice if we did that?
“In other words, the half-second is missed not because it is empty, but because it is overfull, in excess of the actually per- formed action and of its ascribed meaning” (90). **Because it is the moment of experienced potentiality?
“Will and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative, derived functions which reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed” (90). **IN OTHER WORDS: WILL AND CONSCIOUSNESS ARE MATTERS OF FORMING. Instead of ‘expressed’ he might say ‘experienced’?
“It should be noted in particular that during the mysterious half-second, what we think of as ‘higher’ functions, such as volition, are apparently being performed by autonomic, bodily reactions occurring in the brain but outside consciousness, and between brain and finger, but prior to action and expression” (90). **But the experiment falsifies the situation considerably. For the subject is a full person with history and memory and prior emotion and all of that. So what is identified here as ‘autonomic, bodily reaction’ is not “divorced” from a fully formed, prior-formed self. So of course volition is—in part—performed/experienced by/in autonomic bodily reaction. We are always in a state of unconscious action SIMULTANEOUSly with other ways of being formed (being in-form).
“The formation of a volition is necessarily accompanied and aided by cognitive functions. Perhaps the snowman researchers of the first story couldn’t find cognition because they were looking for it in the wrong place—in the “mind,” rather than in the body they were monitoring [cognition in the body]. Talk of intensity inevitably raises the objection that such a notion inevitably involves an appeal to a pre-reflexive, romantically raw domain of primitive experiential richness-the nature in our culture [Romantic notions of writing, talent]. It is not that. First, because something happening out of mind in a body directly absorbing its outside cannot exactly said to be experienced [oh thank goodness, simultaneity! allatonceness!]. Second, because volition, cognition, and presumably other “higher” functions usually presumed to be in the mind, figured as a mysterious container of mental entities that is somehow separate from body and brain, are present and active in that now not-so-‘raw’ domain” (90). **Okay, I’m beginning to sense Massumi as an ally (shame on my body for feeling so adversarial in my reading! what is up with that?). Here he advocates for allatonceness, and ‘affect’ becomes an aspect of a state of allatonceness, it’s just an aspect usually ignored.
“resonance” and “feedback” function as dialogic actions in Freire/Berthoff/Montessori. But what to make of interpretation as act of mind? Is interpretation also an act of body? Absorption seems opposed to Interpretation in this conversation.
“The body doesn’t just absorb pulses or discrete stimulations; it infolds contexts, it infolds volitions and cognitions that are nothing if not situated. Intensity is asocial, but not presocial—it includes social elements, but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning, and combines them according to different logics” (90-91). ***Glorious!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! I love this distinction between a-sociality and pre-sociality. Whoa and here is something interesting: “other levels of functioning” and “different logics” seem to define “personal”; ‘the personal’ is constitutive of ‘the social’ but uniqueness/personality happens on a specific, bodily ‘level of functioning’ according to a “different logic”… okay what does that mean? NATURAL? BIOLOGICAL? Now I think I am comprehending what is meant by non-semiotic. Maybe.
**BODY KNOWLEDGE: “Only if the trace of past actions including a trace of their contexts were conserved in the brain and in the flesh, but out of mind and out of body understood as qualifiable interiorities, active and passive respectively, directive spirit and dumb matter” (91). **Okay, I am falling for this. I can begin to imagine the conversations that might come of this, thinking about Berthoff and Montessori and Freire in terms of Massumian affect…. Might be useful, might usefully inform our practice. **But still, what does this do to the notion of “interpretation is the central act of mind”? “Mind/body”? If there are always traces, then there is always interpretation; perception and experience always delimited. Is Massumi describing a level of functioning that is the most open to possibility? AMPLIATIVE INFERENCE… The most available to inferences for the making of meaning?
“Intensity is incipience, incipient action and expression. Intensity is not only incipience, but the incipience of mutually exclusive pathways of action and expression that are then reduced, inhibited, prevented from actualizing themselves completely-all but one” (91) ***YES I UNDERSTAND!!!! I HAVE AN IMAGINATION FOR THIS STATE. And I totally get how the term ‘capacity’ speaks to this state. AND I think immediately of the fact that our field considers Berthoff almost exclusively in terms of invention. Berthoff’s pedagogy capitalizes on a state of “incipience,” potentiality, though not as Massumi has it here. Massumi brings our attention to that state-of-body distinct (but not separate) from language/signification and the conscious mind.
“Since the crowd of pretenders to actualization are tending toward completion in a new context, their incipience cannot just be a conservation and reactivation. They are tendencies-in other words, pastnesses opening onto a future, but with no present to speak of. For the present is lost with the missing half-second, passing too quickly to be perceived, too quickly, actually, to have happened” (91). ***All the non-actualized possible bodily reaction/response in any given moment is a state, but this realm of possibility is not infinite. It is form before finding form? This is the state of the body as form finding form? I don’t feel entirely believing here, but I like the idea. The study, and that half second… It’s not like the body only feels one sensation at a time, only receives input in one place, one input at a time…
“This requires a complete reworking of how we think about the body. Something that happens too quickly to have happened, actually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where futurity combines, unme- diated, with pastness, where outsides are infolded, and sadness is happy (happy because the press to action and expression is life). The virtual is a lived paradox where what are normally opposites coexist, coalesce, and connect; where what cannot be experienced cannot but be felt-—albeit reduced and contained. [Formed] For out of the pressing crowd an individual action or expression will emerge and be registered consciously. One “wills” it to emerge, to be qualified, to take on socio-linguistic meaning, to enter linear action-reaction circuits, to become a content of one’s life-by dint of inhibition” (91). ***The BODY as virtual. I wonder if he’s including the brain here? And what is meant by “unmediated” ? And “expression of life” here is FORMING, the body actualizing one of many possible states. Actualizing = ‘registered consciously’? Consciousness = volition, socio-linguistic meaning, narrative. But ‘inhibition’? Odd word here. Restraint?
“Since the virtual is unlivable even as it happens, it can be thought of as a form of superlinear abstraction that does not obey the law of the excluded middle, that is organized differently but is inseparable from the concrete activity and expressivity of the body” (92). **Beyond logic… Before logic.
“The body is as immediately abstract as it is concrete; its activity and expressivity extend, as on their underside, into an incorporeal, yet perfectly real, dimension of pressing potential” (91). ***whoa. This is purely ontology? Or is this epistemological? Or epistemontological? Does the latter emerge with expression of intensity?
“Bergson could profitably be read together with Spinoza. 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” (91). **Ah. Epistemontological. “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” (92). **”impingement” is friction? point of contact? suppression?
“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” (92).
“The trace determines a tendency, the potential, if not yet the appetite, for the autonomic repetition and variation of the impingement” (92-93). ***The ‘trace’ is form?.
“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” (93).**Mind, though, is not removed from the body. It acts. Is action.
“The autonomic tendency received second-hand from the body is raised to a higher power to become an activity of the mind [emotion?]. Mind and body are seen as two levels recapitulating the same image/expression 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” (92). **That ‘absent center’ is an atom of potentiality.
“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” (93). ***YAY! A Definition!!!
“In a different but complementary direction, when Spinoza defines mind and body as different orders of connection, or different regimes of motion and rest, his thinking converges in suggestive ways with Bergson‘s theories of virtuality and movement. It is Gilles Deleuze who reopened the path to these authors, although nowhere does he patch them directly into each other” (93). *** The Deleuze connection
“It is all a question of emergence, which is precisely the focus of the various science-derived theories which converge around the notion of self-organization (the spontaneous production of a level of reality having its own rules of formation and order of connection” (93).****FORMING… Self-forming is knowledge-forming
“Affect or intensity in the present account is akin to what is called a critical point, or a bifurcation point, or singular point, in chaos theory and the theory of dissipative structures. This is the turning point at which a physical system paradoxically embodies multiple and normally mutually exclusive potentials, only one of which is “selected.” “Phase space” could be seen as a diagrammatic rendering of the dimension of the virtual” (93). ***FIELDS of potential meaning. Is the experience of body being described here similar in some ways to the mind experience as suggested by Peirce’s triadic semiotics?
“Intensity and experience accompany one another, like two mutually presupposing dimensions, or like two sides of a coin. Intensity is immanent to matter and to events, to mind and to body and to every level of bifurcation composing them and which they compose” (93). **Ah HA! Ineinandersein!
“Deleuze’s philosophy is the point at which transcendental philosophy flips over into a radical immanentism, and empiricism into ethical experimentation” (93). ***Oh this is interesting. In a sense, Berthoff’s ‘chaos generation’ aims to teach writing on a dimension that is much closer to “immanentism” … or at the nexus of immanentism and empiricism, that space of willful recognizing/determining.
“Kant meets Spinoza, where idealism and empiricism turn pragmatic, becoming a midwifery of invention—with no loss in abstractive or inductive power. Quite the contrary-both are heightened. But now abstraction is synonymous with an unleashing of potential, rather than its subtraction” (93). **Dude. But this “abstraction” is different from Berthovian abstraction? Or the thinking move that we call “abstraction”?
(to be continued)
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