I really liked Massumi’s discussion of affect. He separates affect into two main sectors/factors which are qualities and intensity. He confuses me when he says, “there is no correspondence or conformity between qualities and intensity. If there is a relation, it is of another nature,” because my spring break experience composed a correspondence between the two, or so I thought.
Over spring break my mom, little brother, and I went to Six Flags Over Texas in Arlington. I was so happy/shocked that when we got there my 44 year old mother got in line with us to ride each ride. As the day went on, it became routine for me to give a rating of the “scariness” of the ride based off of my memory.
We eventually worked our way to the roller coaster Judge Roy Scream. My mom asked for my rating. I looked at the image of the roller coaster; its high crawls and low drops. Then I flipped through my mental registry to see what I remembered most about the ride. I rated the ride an 8, really scary.
The intensity of the image of the roller coaster was strong. It had been years since I last ventured to an amusement park, yet the memories of this scary ride lingered within me. The qualities or context of the image of this ride told me that as I remembered the roller coaster went very fast and was very scary.
As we approached the front of the line my palms began to sweat and I started getting anxious. A bit of that might have been due to my expectations for the ride. However, I think there must have been some type of correlation between me seeing the ride in front of me and remembering the same image from the last time I had rode the roller coaster. The correlation between the two is what I thought lead to my high ranking of the ride, sweating palms, and anxiety. The overall affect is that the ride is unpleasant.
What do you think?
When Massumi says that there's no "correspondence" between quality and intensity, I interpreted it as a reference to a division of an event into the qualified (linear narrative) meaning, and the unqualified (superlinear) affect.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your roller-coaster experience. So, it seems, you were expecting that the ride would be frightening, and it in fact was frightening (sweaty palms and anxiety) leading to your score of 8 on the 10 scale. Massumi and Edbauer were keen on mentioning that intensity comes when whenever we have a break from our expectations, however yours was a situation where, interestingly, the affective response came even though your expectations were largely spot-on. Perhaps we could get around Massumi's wording, and say that, without doubt, the qualified meaning and the unqualified affect of an event both "feed into" the same resulting state. At some point, affect is realized, or "felt" and that feeling gets incorporated into the conscious reasoning process(put on the grid) that evaluates something like a roller coaster as an 8. Of course, we don't experience the affect itself consciously, but only the conscious perception of the affect (I notice my heart is racing. Just like Ielectrochemical responses to green light inside my eye.)
So I don't think that they're unrelated (quality and intensity), it's just that they operate independently at first, before being combined on a conscious level.
p.s. How was your trip to Pepperdine?
Ha! Gordon, I really like your conclusion. That would make more sense to say that quality and intensity are connected, but they just start off independent from each other. Thanks for helping me piece that together.
ReplyDeleteI haven't ventured on the trip yet. I leave Thursday the 7th. Hopefully, I won't get lost in the airport, and will get on the right plane. :)
Oh, Okay. Well, good luck and safe travels!
ReplyDeleteI think that expectations can often override the "reality" (Massumi's "qualified" meaning) of something that we do, and there's no doubt that it has an effect on the affect we feel. Oftentimes I'll see people play a new videogame with certain expectations, and often they'll end up only looking for reasons it was good/bad depending on how they thought of it prior to playing, neglecting to take in the big picture as a whole. While, as Gordon mentions, they do operate independently at first, they do combine eventually, but it's at this point that we have to keep the two relatively separate so that we can make a proper judgment of something like a speech, a roller coaster, or a video game.
ReplyDeleteI agree with Gordon. Massumi asserts that conscious “meaning” and unconscious “effect” are variables independent of one another. Yet, at times our conscious expectations can shape the way we are unconsciously affected by something. In a movie, for instance, our expectations can shape the way we experience the movie. If a movie is great when we expected it to be great, one affect is elicited. If a movie is horrible when we expect it to be great, another affect is elicited altogether. Because we have expectations, the way we affectively experience the world changes.
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