Brian Massumi > Quotes

“Ethics is about how we inhabit uncertainty, together.”
― Brian Massumi

“Take joy in your digressions. Because that is where the unexpected arises. That is the experimental aspect. If you know where you will end up when you begin, nothing has happened in the meantime. You have to be willing to surprise yourself writing things you didn't think you thought. Letting examples burgeon requires using inattention as a writing tool. You have to let yourself get so caught up in the flow of your writing that it ceases at moments to be recognizable to you as your own. This means you have to be prepared for failure. For with inattention comes risk: of silliness or even outbreaks of stupidity. But perhaps in order to write experimentally, you have to be willing to 'affirm' even your own stupidity. Embracing one's own stupidity is not the prevailing academic posture (at least not in the way I mean it here).”
― Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

“so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered. Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect.2 Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism. Affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion.3 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. An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits,”
― Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

“The easiest way to get rid of an unwanted conditioned response is to substitute a better response.”
― Ernest Kinnie PhD, BRAINWASH the MASSES: politicians and advertisers make you their useful idiot

“More than a doctrine, preemption has taken on a life of its own. It launches into operation wherever threat is felt. In today’s multidimensional “threat environment,” that is everywhere.”
― Brian Massumi, Ontopower: War, Powers, and the State of Perception

“You are aware of the result, not the process.”
― Ernest Kinnie PhD, BRAINWASH the MASSES: politicians and advertisers make you their useful idiot

“unexpected and inexplicable that emerged along with the generated responses had to do with the differences between happiness and sadness, children and adults, not being all they’re cracked up to be, much to our scientific chagrin: a change in the rules. Intensity is the unassimilable. For present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect. There seems to be a growing feeling within media, literary, and art theory that affect is central to an understanding of our information- and image-based late capitalist culture, in which so-called master narratives are perceived to have foundered. Fredric Jameson notwithstanding, belief has waned for many, but not affect. If anything, our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it. The problem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect.2 Our entire vocabulary has derived from theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconcilable differences (the divorce proceedings of poststructuralism: terminable or interminable?). In the absence of an asignifying philosophy of affect, it is all too easy for received psychological categories to slip back in, undoing the considerable deconstructive work that has been effectively carried out by poststructuralism. Affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion.3 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. An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits,”
― Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation

“Lincoln almost got it right.  Sure you can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time. Who cares!  All you really have to do is fool most of the people right before the election.”
― Ernest Kinnie PhD, BRAINWASH the MASSES: politicians and advertisers make you their useful idiot

“Autism activist Jim Sinclair writes, “Autism isn’t something a person has, or a ‘shell’ that a person is trapped inside. There’s no normal child hidden behind the autism. Autism is a way of being. It is pervasive; it colors every experience, every sensation, perception, thought, emotion, and encounter, every aspect of existence. It is not possible to separate the autism from the person—and if it were possible, the person you’d have left would not be the same person you started with.”
― Brian Massumi, Thought in the Act: Passages in the Ecology of Experience

“Increasingly power functions by manipulating that affective dimension rather than dictating proper or normal behaviour from on high. So power is no longer fundamentally normative, like it was in its disciplinary forms, it's affective. The”
― Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect