Brennan: Transmitting Some New Ideas

Reading through Brennan the first time left me in a lot of confusion, lost in a flurry of new vocabulary and new ideas and new authors. However, reading it again in the context of the rest of the authors on affect in the rest of the courses helped me to understand what Brennan was saying more clearly. If the implications about affect and its effect on social theory are true, then Brennan's research may be just as important as any other theorist's.

What caught my eye the most out of the book was Chapter Three: Transmission in Groups. This almost parallels Ahmed's affective ecologies and Rice's affective economies. As Brennan says, "the theory of the transmission of affect is always and already, given this definition, a theory of the group" (Brennan 51). Without the group, there would obviously be no transmitting of affect. But given that almost everything that we do, understand, and experience is influenced in some way or other by a group, the transmission of affect has a profound impact. Brennan goes on to say that affects can be influenced by different cultures, interests, and many other phenomena that are all around us. Brennan, like many other social theorists and psychologists, has found something intriguing about the "group mind," except that Brennan labels it as affect.

I think one of the most insightful things from Brennan's book was the amount of importance on the physical during the transmission of affect. In a group or social setting, pheromones, hormones, and other physiological details like visual cues from one individual can spread to the whole group. Brennan uses the example of crowd violence being "attributed to the action of images in the first instance, and it is clear that an image itself will trigger an increase or decrease in certain hormone levels" (Brennan 72). These hormone levels will then spread and transmit to the rest of the group.

For me, this was a really significant discovery. Very simply, it makes sense -- many people can "feel" the mood of a room when the walk in or pick up the same attitude as those around them. But to know that affect is transmitted physiologically and influences how we think or act is something profound. And we can't really control it. The implications of Brennan's discoveries are just as important as any other writer -- Massumi, Rice, Ahmed -- and really set the precedent for our class in the rest of the semester to move on from pathetic appeals to affective ones.