I just read the first chapter of Massumi the second time through (several weeks later), and I am still not close to comprehending the entirety of his concept of affect. It starts off simply enough: the strange results of the snowman film research show us some dichotomies between content and affect, the physiological and the conscious, intensity and qualification. For someone who's foundations of thought and epistemology are on a simpler plain of thought, this is an intriguing proposition. The different examples and stories that Massumi gives clearly challenge the traditional line of thought: apparently content and meaning weren't the only things that matter in communication and understanding.
Massumi moves very quickly from a specific challenging our traditional forms of thought and expands it to the realm of our entire understanding. I can accept the theory that the physiological, the intensity of affect impacts the way I respond separately from consciousness, but before Massumi fully hashes this out, he starts to bring in several philosophers and new terms: Spinoza, Kant, the "virtual," the "potential," Deleuze, "emergence," and even quantum mechanics! It's likely that I will never be at a point of fully understanding the concepts that Massumi presents, but I do believe that he is offering a theory of knowledge that transcends the traditional -- as he says, "Affect is the whole world... and needs to be taken into account in cultural and political theory" (Massumi, pg. 43-45).
But for the sake of discussion, and for my own comprehension, I'd like to park on a smaller chunk of Massumi's huge claim of affect -- simply that the response of physiological intensity is just as important as a cognitive, conscious response in content. Both the snowman and Reagan examples challenge the common sense view of understanding, that all understanding comes from meaning and content. Yet we can see that this clearly is not the case; affect influences everything, as Ahmed and Edbauer Rice both theorize as well, and sometimes, affect goes even against the common sense view of content. Even though neither Reagan's delivery nor content were solid, let alone stellar, he "was an effective leader not in spite of but because his double dysfunction... and that is why the majority of the electorate could disagree with him on major issues but still vote for him" (Massumi, pg. 40-41).
This is just shocking to me. Seeing as how the rhetoric of Presidential speeches is a whole category of importance and much of what the American people see and decide off of, it seems that someone who was bad at delivery and content shouldn't be in the running. But simply the jerkiness, the interruption, the suspense, and the fact that each interruption had the potential to be something different made it so that Reagan's greatness was actualized through the interpretation of the media. And in the end, it was Reagan's confidence that put it all together; as Massumi says, "Confidence is the apotheosis of affective capture" (Massumi, pg. 42).
So what are we supposed to take away from this? I think what Massumi is saying (and I emphasize, "I think") is that affect opens up a potential for many different perspectives than just the speaker's original meaning. I'm not really sure what that means pragmatically -- it doesn't even seem like this is something that can be controlled. If affect really is this important, what are we supposed to do about it? I think somewhere in the chapter Massumi talks about "an idea of the idea of the affection" having a "doubling over the idea on itself" (Massumi, pg. 31), but even then, through all the different concepts I'm still not sure what to do with that. Perhaps it just means that our interpretation of things isn't as simple as we think. That the common misconception of "emotion is not logical" can be explained by your response in affect. Who knows. Suffice it to say that affect deserves a deeper look, and it could quite possibly be the new foundation for how we communicate and interact in social environments.
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