#massumi

[monasticcellphone]

The belief that knowledge ought to be useful was of course not some free-floating idea. Rather, it was an integral part of the formation of early modern states and the concomitant politics of knowledge. In fact, the practice of government in early modern Europe was increasingly based on the systematic collection of information arranged for practical purposes, such as public finances (économie politique, kameralnaja nauka), the mapping of the state territory (cartography), and the welfare and surveillance of the governed (political arithmetic, statistics and Polizeiwissenschaft). Not without good reason did Max Weber describe the rise of bureaucracy, one of the key factors in the development of early modern states, as the ‘exercise of control on the basis of knowledge’ (Weber 1922: 339).

Feldner and Vighi, Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism

The rise of the ‘life sciences’ during the second half of the eighteenth century shows the extent to which the ‘anthropological turn’ included a number of opposite trends. The development of the life sciences was underpinned by a resurgence of notions such as active matter, self-generating motion and purposive development, which regained some of their former currency. ‘Organ’, ‘organism’ and ‘organization’ replaced ‘machine’, ‘mechanism’ and ‘mechanisation’ as lead metaphors in the process. This goes to show that the shift from Aristotelian to experiential idioms, in the sciences as well as in political thought, was neither a clear-cut process nor one that was ever complete. Not only Romanticism, Marx’s Capital, too, would have been inconceivable otherwise.

Feldner and Vighi, Critical Theory and the Crisis of Contemporary Capitalism

The question is not: is it true? But: does it work? What new thoughts does it make it possible to think? What new emotions does it make it possible to feel? What new sensations and perceptions does it open in the body? 

The answer for some readers, perhaps most will be ‘none.’ IF that happens, it’s not your tune. No problem.

Brian Massumi’s forward to Deleuze and Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus

[azicikyasliyimama]

“dünyaya inanmanın bir yolunu bulmak” 

[publicatiosui]

If you don't understand try to feel. According to Massumi it works.

quoted in Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique”

[whentheynyan]

In becoming is belonging.

[proustiansleep]

Pure and simple feeling is a quality of experience ‘present without compulsion and without a reason’ (Peirce, 1998: 4).  [...] ‘Present without compulsion or reason, dreamily, it needn’t be red at all. It could just as well be turquoise blue (Peirce, 1998: 4). Or, Peirce’s all-time favorite, magenta. Or it could be an odor, say of attar. But then again, what if the person is not saying to himself that the quality pleases him, because it doesn’t? Quality might just as well be ‘a piercing endless whistle’. Or ‘just one infinite ache’ (Peirce, 1997: 140). One infinite ache, and nothing but. A universe of ache. Can you imagine? Save yourself the pain. For in order to make the full measure of a Quality absolutely, immediately, simply present, you must ‘now imagine that the rest of your consciousness, memory, thought, everything except this feeling … is utterly wiped out’ (Peirce, 1992: 259). You’re not even there.

Βrian Massumi, Such As It Is: A Short Essay in Extreme Realism

[proustiansleep]

One never writes alone. As Deleuze and Guattari say, one writing alone is already a crowd. Our words in this book are never without the echoes of the voices of those whose difference we chose to write with. Not to mention the moves, gestures, colors, architectures, and events of the creative practices we encountered. A veritable cacophony. Or better: an ecology.

Erin Manning&Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act

[proustiansleep]

Shock. That’s what Peirce says. Affect for me is inseparable from the concept of shock. It doesn’t have to be a drama. It’s really more about microshocks, the kind that populate every moment of our lives. For example a change in focus, or a rustle at the periphery of vision that draws the gaze toward it. In every shift of attention, there is an interruption, a momentary cut in the mode of onward deployment of life. The cut can pass unnoticed, striking imperceptibly, with only its effects entering conscious awareness as they unroll. This is the onset of the activation I was referring to earlier. I’d go so far as to say that this onset of experience is by nature imperceptible. This is one way of understanding “microperception,” a concept of great importance to Deleuze and Guattari. Microperception is not smaller perception; it’s a perception of a qualitatively different kind. It’s something that is felt without registering consciously. It registers only in its effects. According to this notion of shock, there is always a commotion under way, a “something doing” as James would say. There is always a something-doing cutting in, interrupting whatever continuities are in progress. For things to continue, they have to re-continue. They have to re-jig around the interruption. At the instant of re-jigging, the body braces for what will come. It in-braces, in the sense that it returns to its potential for more of life to come, and that potential is immanent to its own arising. You can sometimes feel the in-bracing itself, most noticeably in startles or frights. Before you can even consciously recognize what you’re afraid of, or even feel that it is yourself that is the subject of the feeling, you are catapulted into a  feeling of the frightfulness of the situation. It only dawns on you in the next instant that you’d better figure out what might have done the catapulting, and what you should do about. It is only then that you own the feeling as your own, and recognize it as a content of your life, an episode in your personal history. But in the instant of the affective hit, there is no content yet. All there is is the affective quality, coinciding with the feeling of the interruption, with the kind of felt transition I talked about before. That affective quality is all there is to the world in that instant. It takes over life, fills the world, for an immeasurable instant of shock. Microperception is this purely affective re-beginning of the world.

Brian Massumi, Of Microperception and Micropolitics

[3440163]

“captures” of affect

Emotions, according to him [massumi], are “captures” of affect within structures of meaning that, inevitably, cannot give a complete account of affects.