Interview with Massumi
- writing process starts when research becomes overwhelming
- writing is used to hold onto complexity without expressing it, writing from another perspective (ie another person writing in response) teases out some of the complexity
- writing in long periods, remember to eat and walk
- essay works with “conceptual impossibility,” to bring positivity to difficult texts. outline based on subsection titles, use outline to imagie connections. outlines become unreadable, “invocation of ideas.” writing often does not feel like his own, it is unrecognizable. this is a positive surprise.
- best writers use rhythm of words + meaning, allow idiosyncrasies w/ economy of expression and not quirks, academics that see themselves as essayists.
- desire to make reading enjoyable, recall rhythm of speech by variation of length of sentences/use of words with different roots/use of technical and every day words, variation of tone from serious to silly. not composed for speech.
- writing is successful when it enables reader to see things in the world that would otherwise be unremarkable. new thoughts as gifts and invitations, not obligations.
- cultural studies “sets out to encounter differences,”… “has to grapple with vacillation between the shareable and unsharable, the understandable and unimaginable”
- advice: instead of writing personally, it is most interesting when something compelling in the world can express itself through you.
- thinks of original writing as a kind of translation process. (background as translator).
- affect is before emotion, feeling, perception. participation is before affect.
- his writing does not clarify but it accumulates and complexifies. is the synaesthesia-effect(sentences have shape, motion, linkage/leakage, directonality) of reading his writing intentional? …thinks/feeling of writing as kinesthetic, conceptual directions that when brought together and taken apart will carry memory / change of having come together. enjoys point in essays when ideas fall into each other in dense mass of renewing even when feeling exhausted. pushing past this difficult point is energizing, though may not be for reader (though hopefully for some).
Massumi, Brian. Writing Space: Interviews. Affect Theory: Worldings/Tensions/Futures Conference Website. 2002/2015 http://wtfaffect.com/brian-massumi/
Further Reading/Watching (From the Conference):
Lisa Blackman and Heather Love, “Queer Science and the Ethics of Description,” Affect Theory Conference: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (plenary session 1), on Thursday, October 15, 2015 from 10:30 to 12:00pm at the Ware Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Lauren Berlant and Kathleen Stewart, “The Hundreds,” Affect Theory Conference: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (plenary session 3), on Friday, October 16, 2015 from 3:20 to 4:50pm at the Ware Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Steven Shaviro, Brian Massumi, Erin Manning, “Affecting Others Otherwise,” Affect Theory Conference: Worldings, Tensions, Futures (plenary session 7), on Saturday, October 17, 2015 from 8:45 to 11:00pm at the Ware Center, Lancaster, Pennsylvania.
Never have plasmodial slime molds been so entertaining or so controversial. Steven Shaviro offered a humorous and provocative venture into speculative realism. He challenged the dogmas of analytical philosophy by extending the question of mind and mentality, proposing a shift from consciousness to sentience. Responsive to their environment, able to make choices, appearing to have emotional tones observable by the rhythmic pulsing of their cytoplasm plasmodial slime molds, Shaviro claims, offer evidence of cognition without brains. Shaviro suggests therefore that sentience rather than human consciousness should be the guiding principle of posthuman analysis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3x0lNP9TKuM (40:15 mins)
Erin Manning focused on her work with emerging authors, thinkers, and scholars who are also autistic, for example Lucy Blackman In her work Blackman describes a sense of “carrying the feeling,” in which the felt experience has an emergent relation which incorporates the environment. Manning suggests, that this non-normative experience of relationality might offer insights into how the lines and limits of subjectivity are defined. The boundaries of experience, what the human is, and can be, is often constructed by neurotypically inflected limits, creating a “neurotypical myth.” Thus a politics of neurotypicality emerges. Autistic scholars and artists suggest a feeling of multiplicity that is not so fixed, a “hyper-relationality,” claims Manning, which offers a widening of the field of experience and therefore of the scope of the human.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1&v=l2iElXKgeF8&feature=emb_logo (39:13 mins) // Erin Manning Interview: http://wtfaffect.com/erin-manning-interview/
The “datafication of the 21st century” makes us porous and multiple, and therefore what, asks Patricia Clough, has become of the human subject and psychoanalysis? Datafication leads to “a displacement of consciousness as a hub of experiencing meaning,” reconfiguring sensory fields to create a “society of microsensibilities.” Clough claims, since our modern psyche comes into being in a nonhuman environment it creates a “thingself,” meaning we must consider a “nonhuman unconscious of dissociated selves.” Indeed, Clough claims, the sociopolitical trauma of this time creates a new type of wound which requires us to rethink the death drive in the light of this quintessential 21st century relational form. For Clough this is no longer the human or the conscious self, but rather relations of media – the “it:it” relationship.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZH9S2Cw59OM&feature=emb_logo (40:15 mins) // Steven Shivario Interview: http://wtfaffect.com/steven-shaviro/
Artists and Affect Theorists working together:
Kay Gordon “Neurons / Deterritorializing” + Tony Sampson “The Assemblage Brain: Sense Making in Neuroculture” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=19&v=u7lOQ-AFXvA&feature=emb_logo (4:30 mins)
Further Reading:
Capacious: The Journal for Emerging Affect Inquiry
Body & Society, Cultural Studies, Critical Inquiry, Subjectivities
Massumi, the Bleed