#ruth leys

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

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

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And now the larger stakes of Massumi’s effort to distinguish “affect” from signification begin to become clear. He is not interested in the cognitive content or meaning political or filmic or fictional or artistic representations may have for the audience or viewer but rather in their effects on the subject regardless of signification. The whole point of the turn to affect by Massumi and like-minded cultural critics is thus to shift attention away from considerations of meaning or “ideology” or indeed representation to the subject’s subpersonal material-affective responses, where, it is claimed, political and other influences do their real work. The disconnect between “ideology” and affect produces as one of its consequences a relative indifference to the role of ideas and beliefs in politics, culture, and art in favor of an “ontological” concern with different people’s corporeal affective reactions. We find a similar disconnect between meaning and affect in Smail’s neurohistory, where, for example, gossip is said to have nothing to do with meaning, but is a “meaningless social chatter whose only function is the mutual stimulation of peace-and-contentment hormones. Gossip, in this model, remains important as a medium of communication,” as Smail observes, but what get communicated are not “primarily words and their meanings” but “chemical messengers.” For both the affect theorists and Smail, then, political campaigns, advertising, literature, visual images, and the mass media are all mechanisms for producing such effects below the threshold of meaning and ideology. In short, according to such theorists affect has the potential to transform individuals for good or ill without regard to the content of argument or debate. These are the reasons Massumi and the others are interested in scientific studies allegedly showing that affective processes and even a kind of intelligence go on in the body independently of cognition or consciousness and that the mind operates too late to intervene.

Ruth Leys, The Turn to Affect: A Critique