I have to say that I enjoyed this week’s reading. Edbauer did a great job of explaining Massumi’s ideas about affect, and I feel that I am getting a better understanding about this topic. One thing I have been noticing though is a recurring theme between the readings from Damazio till Edbauer. It seems that the age old debate between body vs. mind is being mentioned or hinted throughout these readings.
For centuries, there has been a debate over which substance, the body or mind, is superior. Philosophers like Descartes thought that the material substance (the body) could not think (Wiki). Hence, the mind would be the superior one. I think many people, especially scientists, have carried over this ideology as they place cognition ahead of bodily matters. As a society, we have come to value the mind (cognition) over the body because we feel it’s the rational one. But Edbauer changes this idea when she writes “Although we are often eager to give primacy to consciousness and cognition—thereby also reducing corporality to a secondary importance –Spinoza finds evidence that the noncognitive aspects of the body reflect a kind of thinking (pg. 15, par. 26).”
What Edbauer is trying to explain is that the body thinks through affects. And what is even more amazing, and scary, is that it does this before we even cognitively think about it. “Before we approach a situation cognitively, as subjects, we are already involved relationality (Edbauer, pg 20, par. 30).” For me, this idea is very powerful. Coming from a psychology major, I know the extensive time, money, and research that goes into studying cognition. But seeing as there is intensity, even pre-sense, that thinks before you even think makes me believe that maybe we should be studying affect as much as cognition.
As rhetoricians, affect will have a profound effect on how we move our audiences. In college, I think students worry too much about trying to make the perfect sentence or paragraph. Obviously, Bush is an example of how what we say is not important. For all the words he makes up, or sentences he rearranges, Bush still exudes his affect towards others, and he still changes us in a way. The real goal we should be working towards as writers is becoming in relation with our audience, entering into that transition passage. The only one worry I have about affect is the power it has. If someone like Bush can affect us, before we can even cognitively process it, what other kinds of people can put us under this “relational” spell?
Work Cited
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dualism_(philosophy_of_mind). April 3, 2011
The reading that I liked that could connect to your blog post was on page 10 when she talks about "from situs to distribution." Edbauer talks about the viral/genetic connection between a baboon and a cat. Although this was a pretty weird study, the message I got from it at the end was derived from the line "a rhetoric emerges already infected by the viral intensities that are circulating in the social field...what is shared between them is not the situation, but certain contagions and energy."
ReplyDeleteTo me, this shouts out "emotions are contagious," if we use rhetoric correctly and effectively than our audience can be moved. The more people that are effected=the more people that are effected.
I, like you, thought Edbauer did a good job fleshing out the abstract concepts that Massumi tried to express. It is indeed fascinating that unconscious affect operates prior to conscious cognition. That modern psychology focuses more on cognition than affect may be frustrating, but I think affect is an inherently difficult area of study, for the unconscious is much harder to empirically prove and study than the unconscious. Plus, affect is a relatively new area of study—so just wait!
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