Script & sources at: www.thenandnow.co/2023/06/15/introduction-to-affect-theory-brian-massumi-eve-sedgwick/ ► Sign up for the newsletter to get concise digestible summaries: www.thenandnow.co/the-newsletter/ ► Why Support Then & Now? www.patreon.com/user/about?u=3517018
Discussed affect theory in one of my grad school classes yesterday and found my brain a little muddy trying to make sense of it. This video was extraordinarily helpful. Thank you for your work!
@@Nonno272 I am in an accelerated program and we had a paper where we had to describe the theory and compare Sedgwick to other philosophers. We only studied the topic for a week and most of the reading went wayyy over my head
Ever since I heard the idea of my existence being the outcome of an inifinte number of possibilities it changed my entire view on who I am. I am still very much inextricably tied to my experiences and they define me, being born black, being born in Trinidad and Tobago etc. But it also creates conflict because I could have easily been born elsewhere and could have been someone else. So how important is my ethnicity in defining who I am? How important is my nationality? On a fundamental level it truly helps me to see the humanity in people much different from myself. On another different but related topic. I am also preoccupied with the idea of language being the thing that locks us into a shared view of reality. If the world was not described to us, how would we view it? What would reality seem like?
@@little_flitter I hear that. Just found the video and added to my Watch Later list. Gonna take it in... some of his other videos have very intriguing titles so I'm sure I'll be going down a rabbit hole later!
I have an existential crisis almost every day and in fact, I'm sitting here with tears in my eyes from this video because of the overwhelming feeling I get when I imagine how the world/our society could be and how the world, as it currently is, is so far removed from that image...
Thanks so much for including Sedgwick ! I’m sure you are inundated with requests but I’d love to see a video on queer theory, Sedgwick, Edelman, Butler or Bersani...etc (although maybe I shouldn’t wait and just make my own - your videos are very inspiring!)
I love your channel! It's incredibly useful and all the videos are wonderfully edited. I would really appreciate it if you also provided either transcripts or closed captioning. The auto-gen captioning isn't always reliable. Thanks so much for the uploads!
I am wiritng a book where i discuss about the nature of mind vs body. In it i use Spinoza and Lacan psychoanalysis the synthesizes the affects and language or reason. Just like how the video described the affects, language produces the gateway in which this intensity passes through to become an emotion with an object, or person. Language or reason does not bind us with something. It is our emotion that does that bit our emotions are constructed via language, which orginally was an affect. Paraphrasing Kant, language without the affects are impotent, affects without language is blind
Saying performative utterances "create the world" might be easy to misunderstand. Austin's examples are about getting married or naming a ship. Austin described it more like the statement becoming true in virtue of itself, rather than changing the world. (But if you think the name of a ship is part of the world, that's totally ok, I just want to point out something that might be tricky).
Been reading scraps here and there about affect theory and this was a really great help to me. thanks! got any reccomendations as to where to start with these thinkers?
Nice, I enjoyed very much. Hoping for an eventual Whitehead video, as his thoughts undergird much of what's discussed here, especially with reference to Deleuze in particular. His concept of prehension is also very relevant to affect theory in general.
For my grad project, I'm working with/through affect theory (which isn't a theory by the way) and I can without doubt say that the day I'm done with it is the day I last speak about it. #Bewildering. Deployment of language which makes affect "ungraspable" is very unhelpful. Affect is everything! What on this planet does not affect or get affected?
Does that not send a warning about the veracity of this shit? A short vid explains it all! LOL! I can do better than that - it's fucking bollox! Save your money and time and do/study something useful instead.
@@googleacount3611 Defect Theory is a fraud. It's pseudo-spiritual gobshite for wankers who want philosophy to be a substitute religion - and not a way of helping you to use your common-sense. If you want it to be 'deep' it can be made to be deep. Enough people with tax-payer backing can be found to call it deep. The rest of the planet will, however, ignore the cult. An intro contains as much insight as a deep rummage in this oh-so deep stuff. Alternatively, people who follow this shit can lick my balls.
@@googleacount3611 Your sarcasm is misplaced. It is not possible to construct a decent criticism of Defect Theory. There is so little in it and its pseudo-mystical and faux spiritual elements are so cringey, tofu-laden and cliched, that only mockery will do. Given time, it's possible to say profound things about stupidity and gullibility - but this isn't the time nor the place. Sleep tight my little gullible mug.
Neuroimaging studies suggest that as we watch what someone else is doing (especially if it is an intentional and/ or goal-related movement) our brains mirror the firing pattern going on for real in their brains and bodies. When we watch someone we care about in pain, or watch someone smell a liquid that turns out to be disgusting, our brains fire in the same distinctive way as the brains of those actually in pain or experiencing disgust. This research argues that as an organism moves around the world its brain is constantly preparing and holding in potential a range of relevant action patterns in relation to the objects it encounters. -Wetherell Could this tie into types of BPD?
Massumi actually talk about this subject in ''what animals teach us about politics''. It goes like this : ''Note: The purpose of the warning is to signal a divergence between the speculative pragmatism developed here and, on the one hand, pragmatic philosophies for which function and utility are primary and, on the other hand, speculative realism and object- oriented ontology. As a substance based ontology, ooo, as developed by Graham Harman (2005), is fundamentally at odds with process- oriented onto genetic philosophies whose ultimate notions are activity and event rather than substance, and whose metaphysical task is to think subjectivities- without- a-subject rather than the object without the subject. Quentin Meillassoux’s influential version of speculative realism sternly applies the law of the excluded middle, or the law of noncontradiction, and deals with the aporias associated with it by appealing not to the positivity of mutual inclusion but to contingency, understood not creatively but negatively, as the ultimate impossibility of applying the law of the excluded middle in a way that effectively excludes uncertainty (Meillassoux 2008). Speculative pragmatism, on the other hand, passionately embraces uncertainty, with all the productive powers of effective paradox. It embraces uncertainty, but takes no interest in absolute contingency, on the processual grounds that wherever thought can penetrate there has always already been a taking- determinate form, so that the world is littered with the leavings of past emergences. For this reason, contingency is never absolute, because what unfolds from it has to pick a path through the leavings, which constrain its course. In Whitehead’s terms, the unfolding of contingency is always relative to the “settled world.” Even quantum contingency in physics is either captured into what animals teach us about politics 49 higher- level physical pro cesses that are not purely contingent (the structure and periodicities of the atom, for starters) or perishes no sooner than it arises, leaving no effect and thus having no eff ective existence (virtual particles in the quantum void). Anywhere other than at the in effective vanishing point of existence, absolute contingency is a purely formal creature of logic (as is contradiction, for different reasons pertaining to the speciousness of the negative; for Bergson’s classic critique of the negative, see Bergson 1998, 272- 298). Contingency as it occurs in the world is in the constitutive gaps factoring into all emergences and, again, in the gaps between settlements (captures). Contingency as it pertains to emergence and insubordination to capture must be thought positively in terms of spontaneity, not negativized as accidental (the mere lack of a sufficient cause) or assimilated to the merely logically uncertain.'' the point is that affect theory (as massumi theorize it) is somewhat more of subjectless-subjectivity than a OOO.
...My main contention here is, I'm coming from a panpsychist point of view; that is, mental states are not reducible to physical states; there is no logical process by which strictly material reagents result in an immaterial product. I'm not sure how much of a difference that makes, though, when my perspective is that the abstract is consciousness' experience of the physical. Like, either way, who we are and what we do is defined by material processes. This actually reminds me a lot of New Materialism. Actually, now I'm not so sure what the difference between Affect Theory and New Materialism really is... Is it that the latter decenters the human, and starts talking about the agency of non-human entities?
Oh, looks like I watched this video before. Well, now I can answer at least one of my own questions: Spinoza, who originated "affect" in this sense, was a panpsychist of some sort, although he had a more monist point of view than me.
4:40 The question doesn't make sense, it's unclear and very hard to parse. But the answer makes perfect sense. The way out of many so called philosophical problems is to not commit the sin of dualism in the first place. The mind-body problem isn't a problem, mind and body are two ways of talking about the same thing.
I got something on Arendt - she wasn't very good - her magazine article on Eichmann was her best work - not a joke btw and she used to fuck a Nazi war criminal.
Best way is through Patreon (www.patreon.com/thenandnow) or Paypal (www.paypal.com/cgi-bin/webscr?cmd=_s-xclick&hosted_button_id=JJ76W4CZ2A8J2) Either way, thank you!
Lacan essntially weaponized Wittgenstein's 'Word Games' philosophical speculation's on language. Since then its been nothing but a game of identity politic Russian roulette that abuses language and whose target is Contemporary culture. These word salad "theories" that aren't really theories but maybe theories if enough lemmings jump off the aesthetic cliff are no longer even entertaining. The loose framework for such theories are computer science, systems thinking exercises used to develop networked applications. Object relational models are essentially relational databases and processes are squares on whiteboards that indicate transformation of input to output. Rename all of this in hallucinatory vernaculars and you can claim a new theoryish kinda theory.
Lewis: I like how much you emphasize Habermas’ ‘public sphere’ for democratic discussion/argumentation. The structure of YT is oppressive in how it gives power to YT channel users in discussion at the expense of other commenters. Though, on your last video you removed my 1st intellectual property abolition thread without notice to me. And you removed another comment in this video. So instead of immediately removing comments (or blocking users) from now on, I have a suggestion that you respond to each user with the same or similar following comment: “YT channel users can remove any comments and block other users from commenting for any reason. This is anti free speech and gives power to YT channel users at the expense of other users commenting on their channel. Your last comment _________, however I won’t immediately remove this comment. So instead I’m giving you until 24 hours from now to explain why I shouldn’t remove your last comment. (I’m also open to hearing explanations from anyone for why/how I should change this process)” Please let me know your thoughts. You could substitute “remove your comment” with “block you” or “remove your comment & block you” whenever it seems appropriate. It’s also important YT channels don’t ban any particular terms: *All terms can be ethically used in the right context* . It would be very beneficial for free speech & democracy on the internet if more channel users (& users/mods/platform holders on other sites) started conducting themselves like this.
theres a ton of information that your body processes without you ever being aware of because it gets filtered out of consciousness by the thalamus. this might be a good place to start
@@aaron2709 what about tactile sensations that you can feel but usually arent aware of until you pay attention such as your clothes touching your skin or your breathing
@@jkshitz28 I think "until you pay attention" is the operative inflection point. Paying attention, becoming aware or noticing are synonyms for being conscious. Things can happen that we are not aware of/conscious of but those things can not be called an "experience" unless we are conscious of them.
I do like where they’re coming from, but it’s nothing revolutionary - physics is moving towards conceptualizing matter as information and the Catholics have conceptualized the human body as an even mixture of matter and spirit for quite some time now. Stripping away the religious overtones/mythological language, you get pretty much the same idea as what’s presented here (just less abstrusely). Still, it’s interesting and heartening that the post-modernists are catching up to where others have been for quite some time now. Hopefully, they’ll come to a point where they can actually collaborate and respect others..
