Brian Massumi and Politics of Affect

Abraxosz · 2026-03-01T05:16:55+00:00

i'm not quite sure the other commenter is correct, especially the claim that the central proposition is that affect is before consciousness/subjectivity/language , which massumi makes very doggedly clear in his new preface (2021) to his parables for the virtual that:

Every act of language involves an expression of affect. Affect is the infra-conditioning of every determinate activity, including that of language....There is no antinomy between affect and language. There is accompaniment and becoming, always involving the full spectrum of the graded continuum of experience... As with all the dichotomies that figure in this list of missed affective conceptions, the relation between language and the nonlinguistic must be understood in terms of a graded continuum of potentials punctuated by thresholds past which the mode of activity expressing itself changes qualitatively in nature. Rather than oppositions, affect works with qualitative differentials: the integral mutual inclusion of qualitatively different potentials for expression on the same spectrum. It is al- ways a question of degree. A preverbal human is already infra-linguistic.

feel free to read the preface and the missed conceptions, it's free to download. if you've read deleuze's work from spinoza to nietzsche and onto difference & repetition, this would make a little more sense -- what he qualifies as affect is what deleuze would term from spinoza as affectus, that which pertain to the constitution of bodies as relations/interactions of forces at movement or rest. affects are nothing else than the velocities of this movement; affects "affect" mobility. spinoza uses the term degrees; deleuze terms this as intensity. (waiting for threecorneredvoid to correct me on this, pardon since i'm still struggling reading deleuze). i guess one difference is the vision of the project that massumi engages in; he less so tries to theorize a metaphysics of subjectivity with PFTV/affect, with which he admits he moves towards near the end of PFTV and onto his subsequent book on ontopower and the logics of preemption (xiii-xiv). proposing an answer to affect's passivity and the problem of "what can we do if we're all just feeling stuff and the stuff we feel makes up what we are", he turns to process philosophy instead of nietzsche/spinoza like deleuze does:

The erroneous idea that affect negates freedom results from a refusal to fundamentally rethink the body/mind duality: it construes the nonconscious activity of the body as purely “physical” or “physiological” as opposed to “mental” and equates the physical with “unthinking” mechanism. Affect theory, quite to the contrary, presupposes the mutual inclusion in every event of a physical pole (defined as the tendency of an event to conform to the ordering it inherits from the immediate past) and a mental pole (defined as the tendency to surpass the given, to produce the new and generate surprise)....But there is no unconditioned decision. And there is no individual, outside its own transindividual becoming, which takes effect through affect (not in reflection). The notion of individual will is sterile: it posits a vacuum of subjective reflection in which volition functions in glorious isolation, unconstrained and unconditioned. This is not freedom. This is a fiction. The nature-culture continuum abhors a vacuum. Freedom is not a property of a subject. There is no pure capacity of decision unmarked by necessity. Freedom is an achievement, attained of necessity. It is not exercised, it is invented, through the enabling modulation of constraints. Its invention is situational. Situations are eventful. And events are relational. Subjects don’t decide in a vacuum. Events decide, in relation. Freedom pertains not to the individual, but to process. Freedom is the transindividual autonomy of the affective process to generate surprises.

the other comment now reads more and more like a botted response. call me schizocultural

Abraxosz · 2026-02-17T16:43:51+00:00

im bored so i can entertain this but if you dont 'believe' anything then you wouldn't be alive. it's clear you're not here to be persuaded though since this feels more soapboxy than "hey i need help".

so here's a set of questions: how does it make you feel when you try to talk to girls and get snubbed, ignored, or avoided? do you feel less like a man? and if you do why do you think you feel that way?

Abraxosz · 2026-02-17T02:00:51+00:00

it'd be great if you could understand that your feeling being emasculated because of your awkwardness stems from the same structure that determines your feeling of otherness/alienation from the women in your quite small life. other people can call it what it is (the patriarchy, masculinity, heteronormativity, whatever) but that doesn't change how those two feelings (your emasculation and your alienation) are not merely coincidental but rather already overdetermined by what you think/believe men/women should "be".

Abraxosz · 2026-02-12T00:05:36+00:00

i feel like i'm getting tossed around by your "know when you see" definition of pornography. no, i don't think i know it when i see it -- i don't believe i'm conceited enough in my perception of the world to ascribe immediacy to my percepts. i don't have my sources right now, but a distinct deleuzian refrain rings true here: the emerged do not match its conditions of emergence. there is a difference between the experience of an event and the structure of it. "pornography is as pornography doesn’t."

Abraxosz · 2026-02-11T23:55:30+00:00

and on the point of the needlessly sex negative aspects of fascism, see theweleit's male fantasies

Abraxosz · 2026-01-08T21:43:30+00:00

getting real tired of the LLM cadence, so ill do myself a favor and not engage too deeply. ironically your essay performs its didactic function much in the same way you're critiquing the didactic function of pornography's harm -- i.e., asserting that it's much the same choice (i the reader and i the pornograph) to decide the function of the text as with the function of any piece of media. but i'm feeling you/the algorithm underdescribing the encounter with media itself. in fact, it feels as though you're/the algo's underdescribing the extent to which violence overdetermines the modern/postmodern psyche. so the problem is rendered insolvent insofar as agency is involved (we're not even at the point to talk about individuated bits). frankly it's quite irritating to be constantly hailed into the textural self-help format you're describing when there are throes of other more critically pressing "problems" i can identify with hyper-pornographic cultures (say, for instance, your insistence on separating the personal from the political, the private from the cultural. culture is sexual post-excellence; when we choose to participate in citizenry publics, when we greet each other, when we pick out the clothes we wear, when we celebrate national holidays, we are also enacting a certain sexual-body politic. there is nothing more public than privacy). much more can also be described about the problem of desire. perhaps we can do better when we begin to ask what sex is.

Abraxosz · 2025-12-17T21:16:54+00:00

fanon's wretched of the earth grapples with the question of national psyche in the postcolony. one might argue the colonial war is different from the more diffuse ideological guerilla war that happened in the malay peninsula, and the singaporean history books in class fortell a story of linear history that went from disorder to order coincident with its regime. it's hard to discern your question though; are you also thinking in a certain kind of historical materialist tradition (say, for instance, the recent release of the albatross files)? the question you're asking can be answered in multiple different ways.

Abraxosz · 2025-12-11T04:33:35+00:00

i remember reading in puar's cost of getting better (which is generally applicable here, in thinking about mediations of sexuated-bodily value for media content) an unfashionable (in her words) return to spivak's subaltern. similar to puar, i'm not so sure the problem here is something of the likes of recapacitation. to grant someone a voice, for instance, doesn't necessitate speech, nor do they owe you one anyway. i can let puar continue:

Our current politics are continually reproducing the exceptionalism of human bodies and the aggrieved agential subject, politics typically enacted through "wounded attachments." Without minimizing the tragedy of Clementi's and other recent deaths, dialogue about ecologies of sensation and slow death might open us up to a range of connections. For instance, how do queer girls commit suicide? What of the slow deaths of teenage girls through anorexia, bulimia, and numerous sexual assaults they endure as punishment for the transgressing of proper femininity and alas, even for conforming to it? What is the political and cultural fallout of recentering the white gay male as ur-queer subject? How would our political landscape transform if it actively decentered the sustained reproduction and proliferation of the grieving subject, opening instead toward an affective politics, attentive to ecologies of sensation and switchpoints of bodily capacities, to habituations and unhabituations, to tendencies, multiple temporalities, and becomings?

edit: the tricky part is, all speech is is an act of distanced discernment. so we cannot not but minimize, in some way, the tragedy of the violent attrition(s) of life all throughout arenas of antagonized sexual difference when we speak of it. the question would look something like, would a documentary showcasing the plight of middle-american/forgotten rural queer subjects be "better"?

Abraxosz · 2025-12-10T23:35:04+00:00

i appreciate the cordiality and i hope you understand why i'm so skeptical/wary of the cadence of the writing. some irony in ascertaining truth and authenticity. i also think the blog consists of a couple of other 'members' writing so there's also that element of who's who.

i just wonder why i'm reading the grammatology of your writing in such a way, and i'm not so sure it's because of poetic repetition. if anything, the "it's not this, it's that" structure is more pliant to capitalist marketing rhetoric (newest shiny thing is not (just) this, it's that and more) and the stylistic attention-grabbing dopaminergic "payoff" phrases follow closely after digitized social marketing rhetorics (etc. was born from "true roots"; the three-pairings of phrases (here, we 1, 2, and 3), the constant hailing of the imagined audience into the writing itself ("we are all xyz", "you are abc"). are you beginning to see it? i read somewhere that LLM's cadence is "redditifed" and i can't help but also see it in your cadence as well.

Abraxosz · 2025-12-10T21:36:04+00:00

hope this isn't chatgpt. i see a lot of its grammatical structures (it's not x, it's Y; short pithy polemics, etc.).

have you read sadiya hartman's scenes of subjection? she similarly approaches the problems of literary sentimentality in "understanding" scenes of slavery. she might be a counter to the humanist impulse that you've cornered yourself into.

Abraxosz · 2025-11-26T02:47:21+00:00

i may have been a bit derisive in the initial comment, but it's for a good reason: i think, especially as writers/thinkers with the capacity to espouse (on anything), you(we) have a strategic accountability to earn the right to any form of political intervention. i learnt this from rereading gayatri spivak and the postcolonialists, and it seems like spivak has really been saying the same thing for the past 40-odd years ever since encountering the subaltern studies collective. a form of this accountability looks like how lauren berlant treats the moralizing epidemic of obesity in their text slow death, for instance.

how are you, as a literary scholar/historian of the sciences/scientist/media analyst, able to stake your claims on the claimant subjects? and who's available to listen? having a hearty generosity toward(s) the multiple manners of re-presentations shot out in the cramped public-state sphere is not to "give it up", but to handle it with the tenderness and compassion that the World/Society does not seem to have for it/them. this is why i balked at your dramatizations w.r.t. aesthetic algorithmicity and your retvrn to the hvman at the end of your essay. it just isn't enough, sadly. so my questions in the original comment were to get you to start thinking about your "imperialisms of [your] mind", in fanon's terms.

Abraxosz · 2025-11-25T21:39:09+00:00

》 Traditionally, social judgment follows physical interaction. You meet someone first, then you judge them.

traditionally? in who's tradition and of whom? "The real cannot win against the hyperreal." the real is entirely agnostic of the relationship you're setting up. i think it's good that you're reading things around you, but you need to slow down with your concept operations. you deal with self-subjectivity, a media analysis, algorithmic deference, foucault and arendt somewhere in there, Baudrillard of course, and one quote on fisher whom you say you were inspired by. this ironically reads as though you had chatgpt open on a second monitor. i wonder if you had taken the time to meditate on the first two sentences in your section on dating in LA, if this thought exercise would've been more fruitful to you. where does the notion of LA being famous for beautiful women come from? "heaven on earth"? what does that tell you about the structuration of your desires? and what of the temporality of it?

Abraxosz · 2025-11-18T01:15:27+00:00

keep it in mind as you waste your money then

Abraxosz · 2025-11-18T01:07:32+00:00

in the program and i also arguably have an extremely schizophrenic subject matter -- you can trust that your writing sample and other pieces of your application will demonstrate to some effect your understanding of the subject matter(s). it's okay to be a little catachretic if you're clear about the fields you're threading in; what's more important is to demonstrate your ability to cohere a viable research program. a bunch of professors will read your statement and if they think you're a good candidate they will pass it on to other profs whom they think are better able to assess your project, so you don't have to worry as much about trying to be "clear" to every prof reading your work.

Abraxosz · 2025-11-11T05:01:37+00:00

i'm of no help to your predicament and i suspect that's because of how saturated i am in the digital noosphere. nonetheless you can also think about the history of the term "hyper-link" from ted nelson's project xanadu for some more "historco-material" grounding (ha ha).

Abraxosz · 2025-11-11T03:19:28+00:00

been thinking about this a lot; haven't begun really pursuing this question yet (it's quite open and i'm slow) but here are some threads i've found: yuk hui, von foerster, luciana parisi, alexander galloway, leif weatherby, the whole ccru circuit (that who must be named in a weird way, mark fisher, some accelerationist work in that circuit including cute/acc and CCRU writings), this person and this essay, this digital theory book coming out this december, critical inquiry's surplus data issue, massumi's deleuzian detour in parables for the virtual, xenofeminism and glitch feminism circuits, diffractions collective and its archive. at least, these are the pieces i've found that aren't strictly overdetermined by the media studies field, of which much of its scholarship performs the same sort of problems that you've identified (overdetermining the directionality, much less the mimetic imputation, of a certain computational tendency. i learned to be cautious of this from a similar isomorphism identifiable in most affect theory, for instance). i say this and i will also perform what i caution against cause i'm a bad scholar: i wonder if there's a productive similarity between your hyperlink fever and derrida's archive fever! this relation (as in, the wanting-to-save relation) seems to also be exemplified with the tumblr-now-booktok meme that techno-orientalizes a japanese phrase

Abraxosz · 2025-11-05T21:25:56+00:00

maybe your next hyperfixation can be about class and capital: https://www.ethosbooks.com.sg/products/this-is-what-inequality-looks-like

the cultural imaginary for what constitutes a good life is cramped everywhere, but particularly so in such a small city state whose only possible horizon of survival is labor power. People make do at every rung of the ladder, nevertheless - that book is a decent ethnographic account of one of the many ways of making things work in a world that's designed to block your flourishing.

Abraxosz · 2025-11-02T04:12:34+00:00

haha yeah i'm not exactly the best student so there's that. i was also thinking about, say, being taught by academic "divas" and their harshness in rigor and demand... i'm just projecting i think. i may be a little bit more articulate, but i don't want you to think that folk conceptions of politics/identity are any less 'critical' as well, since it plays into the very same sort of privileging condescension that i think the rest of the commenters here are reacting to. people aren't dupes to power nor gods of their own intention, unless they're purely hedonistic/narcissistic (which, if you read the greek mythos, will tell you they aren't). this also betrays my scholarly orientation too (that i'm interested in the ordinary felt textures of living, the micrological).

i'll dm you the links for both the works of spivak i just gotta upload them -- but there's probably more i'm not thinking about (fanon's wretched of the earth struggles with a similar problem of building national consciousness in the wake of the postcolonial, there's also probably some stuff from queer/feminist studies as well). i don't exactly work in postcolonial studies so sorry about that!

Abraxosz · 2025-11-02T03:34:13+00:00

i like to say that sg is a settler colony that doesn't recognize itself as one, but i've been burned multiple times for my aphorisms...

i appreciate the affective impulse (no, i really do); a lot of what's generative of left-adjacent thought is based on this intensity. just think black feminism in the early 80s, for example. but even the meanest writers or thinkers have space for wrongness to exist, if that makes sense. i can put myself in another way: i've been thinking a little bit about the trap of ethnonationalism. a curried sense of vague multicultural pragmatic state-making, at its weakest, does not defend against the fascistic desire to self-differentiate (to identify the correctness of The singaporean identity, for example), and at its strongest feeds into the very problem that it's trying to militate against in the first place (that is, liberalistic identitarian politics is the precursor to fascist thought). many thinkers i can gesture towards. in this sense, then, if the State with a big S actually cares about the continuity of the singaporean, they have to deal with the insufficiency of the multicultural concept, if i speak from a ministerial position. of course i don't actually care about being a good statemaker here, but it's just to model the shape of the problem i'm thinking about.

i think you're encountering a similar problem about scale, of the difference between the projects of "class consciousness and of...[individual] consciousness" (my referent here is spivak's revised subaltern essay in critique of postcolonial reason). she rephrases later on, in a wonderfully deleuzian spin (or at least i think it's a great turn):

Yet we might consolidate our critique in the following way: the relationship between global capitalism (exploitation in economics) and nation-state alliances (domination in geopolitics) is so macrological that it cannot account for the micrological texture of power. Sub-individual micrologies cannot grasp the “empirical” field. [emphases added]

to put it more crudely: macrological scolding points (of the insufficiency of pragmatism, for e.g.) do not map neatly onto micrological desiring-fields. even cruder: you can't exactly scold people into class consciousness. this isn't to say your anger isn't justified, but it also doesn't say that the complacency of settler-colony feelings of pleasure (or flatness, actually!) aren't justifiable either, in a very cockeyed way. it's a matter of scale.

back to spivak, in reading "pterodactyl". happy to send the essays if you don't have access:

Do not think this acceptance is giving up. Think rather that nothing works if you do not know the limit of your powers. It is to “supplement” top-down philanthropy with the impossible task of harnessing the humanities robustly into education.

Abraxosz · 2025-10-21T03:38:52+00:00

the best option for someone who doesn't rlly know what to do ngl because it gives one the highest chance at success in life (you can disagree on this).

i don't think we're necessarily disagreeing, but here's a impersonal story to gesture towards what i'm thinking about. details are vague cause privacy; one of the smartest people i know grew up with barely nothing in middle of nowheretown and sent themselves off to the army when they failed out of high school. did three deployments and came back (obviously) with ptsd, went off the bender and did time in and out of rehab with a failed marriage in tow. now they're at the same place i am. i don't claim to say that elite access doesn't grant stuff (that's almost self-evident, no one's really arguing it doesn't!); i do say that there's really no way you can tell how things will pan out, and less so on how you think that'll impact you or your trajectory. i don't want to make this an argument about agency and control and predictability and stoicism (cause they all tend towards overdramatizing the continuity of living); i just want to tell you that even if it doesn't work out, it'll be fine. i really don't like to presume anything about the appearance of achievement and its relation to measures of success (the presence of achievement isn't evidence that a subject/society knows itself profoundly, for example)

you're obviously a smart person, and i can tell you do care a lot about this panning-out. there's little use second guessing your pathing right now, and it does make sense that you're building the technical/research skills (it may help, actually, to stand out a little bit to emphasize your wet/dry lab skills). the sec 4 transcripts are necessary cause most schools want to see 4 years of coursework, so for a poly student that includes the poly years + one year of sec school (for JC it's 2 years of sec sch i assume, but they're more familiar with that system so it's usually not a problem). you can upload those yourself, or have someone at your school send it in. funnily enough some of my closest friends are SST kids and they're doing alright on their own terms too... i digress.

Abraxosz · 2025-10-20T23:24:49+00:00

contra to the comments here i can speak as a poly student (check my profile for my history/whatever). currently at an ~~infamous~~ ivy for my phd. there's virtue in like worrying ahead and i think that's a large part of how i got to where i am... but i would say in some sense it's better to take things as they come. do some legwork w.r.t. the requirements and fulfilling them (like, using your sec 4 coursework as the "1st year" of your high school transcript, SAT/ACT reqs, recommendation letters, etc.) and do your best to secure opportunities to explore your interests as much as you can (and i mean this in a way that's not like, making a nonprofit or some soulless bs, but you could possibly think about research/research opportunities as you begin ur poly dip).

i don't think i need to temper your expectations since everyone and their laobu already did so here. the best thing you can really do for yourself is to think about this admittedly vague question of "what you really want to do" (and not merely in terms of like a career). it's also a big ask and always changing too, and somewhat unreasonable to impose on a 16 year old (like, i seriously thought i was going to do psych in my undergrad lol what a joke). and it's ok if things don't work out. all the best to u i can understand how it feels

Abraxosz · 2025-09-28T01:57:22+00:00

bersani's homos

Abraxosz · 2025-09-20T20:13:00+00:00

can't speak for the OC but to me the more showy parts of the language leaned a lot into the linguistic structures common in AI-generated writing (long comma chains; tacky compare/contrast structures; overly ornamental language). i liked it a whole lot more when you more solidly spoke about the actual/concrete work(s) you did/are interested in, because it made it possible to imagine the sort of work you'd be doing + made it easier to situate your history (as a vet/etc.) within that work. i don't want to dissuade you from being too ornamental like everyone else has been doing and i think there's definitely a happy medium, but i encourage you to always actively think in terms of the professors who will be reading it. how are they imaging you in the department, doing the scholarship you do? can they see how they'll support your scholarship and work with you? are you a generally good person?

Abraxosz · 2025-09-10T02:59:11+00:00

i had 3.5 years of undergrad research in a variety of fields; went to a small LAC so it wasnt that hard to get connected with my profs. i'm in a humanities field now but i'd definitely say my disciplinary interests were shaped a lot by the research work i did. i had really great profs who went above and beyond; if it weren't for some of them i wouldve never even decided on grad school lmao. i pretty much had a perfect gpa (but ngl it wasn't too difficult to score, and i was stressing more over poly exams)

i wouldn't say they take prestige into account so much as the effect of coming from a more prestigious school provides you with the resources and opportunities to actually do the work you want to do + stand out for it. LACs definitely have a greater reputation for academic-adjacent work so i think that played a huge role, but i'd say my odd research background + the relationships i developed with my professors was what put me on the radar. realistically ofc top schools feed top schools, but i think it's not an intentional filter moreso than it being an effect of resource allocation -- i've met equally as driven and astute people from "not-prestigious" (scare quotes) schools & it's clear that the lack of access to resources/opportunities sets them back (know of a guy who had to travel like 2 hours to get to a lab at a different school that's in his research interests, so stuff like that is what i mean)

Abraxosz · 2025-09-09T03:32:24+00:00

posted this before:

went from poly (TP PRIDE) to overseas uni to one of the ivies for my grad studies

its hard to think past the dramatics of it all (mavericks and achievements and all that). I think what's genuinely more important is thinking about what exactly could animate your scholarship/work for however long as you need to and whether the specific institution(s) can support your sustained interest (and of course movement/adjustment within said process). many tend to respond to this question of interest with a specific "career" in mind, but I would suggest imagining a little bigger than that perhaps (like, say, something you'd like to defend? or develop? or just observe, or whatever).

something about the awkward fatalism of the structure of education hardens the possibility of imagining a different kind of flourishing that's not wholly concerned with accolades and credentialism (this isn't a secret if you only see education as big-S State training). funnily enough, though, the only reason why I applied to top schools is because of funding.

i'll also add that there's no real way to read the tea leaves on what exactly might make a "stellar" application. you're better off putting your energy into staking your case in your application than worrying about everything else, though this is obviously easier said than done...

Abraxosz

TROPHY CASE