For me, the chapters by Massumi were very hard to read. I’m not sure if it was the vocabulary Massumi was using or the content/subject matter of the chapters. A lot of times I just found myself reading a sentence over and over again before moving on to finish the chapters.
However, Massumi’s discussion in "The Autonomy of Affect" regarding how affect is often used as a synonym for emotion caught my attention, interest, and curiosity. Massumi states on page 27 that “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.” First of all, I didn’t know affect was commonly getting used as a synonym for emotion. Second, I agree with Massumi that we need to recognize that affect and emotion follow different logics and pertain to different orders. Affect doesn’t really say intensity to me but rather is mostly used as a verb to indicate influence or change. Emotion is a noun indicating a strong state of a specific feeling. Although affect and emotion mean two different things, emotions do have strong affects. This fact, I think, is what would cause one to think that the words affect and emotion are synonymous. What are your thoughts on this issue?
The discrepancy between affect and emotion is one that each author seems to interpret differently. At the beginning of the semester, I used the two terms interchangeably (as some of our authors have done). But the further we delve into the material, the more I realize that the two are very different. That everyone defines them differently confuses and frustrates me to no end.
ReplyDeleteHere’s what I think Massumi would say. Emotion operates in the realm of meaning. It is describable and it registers on the grid. Affect, on the other hand, relates more to effect. We feel an affect which creates an indescribable effect that doesn’t necessarily register on the grid.