Berge, van den 1
Maud van den Berge
Alexandra Brown
Cultural Studies of Affect & Emotion
30/09/2020
Comparative Paper: Massumi & Ahmed
To gain a better understanding of the different possible trajectories of ‘Affect theory’, this
paper aims to synthesize and compare Sarah Ahmed’s text “The Cultural Politics of Emotion”
(2014), particularly chapter 2 “The Organisation of Hate” and Brian Massumi’s “Autonomy of
Affect” (1995). To be able to compare the two texts properly, it is necessary to establish that the
biggest contrast between Ahmed and Massumi is their conception of where affect is located and
how it functions to produce the subject. Considering Sarah Ahmed’s perspective, the focal point
of analysis lies beyond the body, and within the connections that exist between people, objects,
concepts, all of which are socially and culturally influenced. Ahmed is concerned with the
collective workings of affect; the work affect does to create a certain pattern that produces
subject positions. This does not mean that Ahmed argues that affect does not have a certain
effect on the body, because it is felt in one way or another. She argues that affect “does not
reside in a given subject or object,” rather, it is the “[circulation] between signifiers in
relationship of difference and displacement” that create affect (Ahmed 44).
Affect is thus always in motion, flowing through and between objects and signs in an
accumulative manner. This accumulation is what makes affect economic: “the more signs
circulate, the more affective they become” (Ahmed 45). An example of such circulating signs is
language. The particular words chosen to describe, for instance, Black male bodies as
‘potentially dangerous’, ‘wild’, ‘savage’, etc. compared to describing white male bodies as
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‘decent’, ‘hard-working’, ‘providing’, etc. “generate a subject that is endangered by imagined
others whose proximity threatens not only to take something away from the subject (jobs,
security, wealth), but to take the place of the subject” (Ahmed 43). Ahmed is interested in the
movement of affect, because it moves in particular (political) ways that create hierarchies
between subjects through the ‘threat’ of difference.
For Ahmed, affect residing in movement means that it “does not originate within and
individual psyche; it does not reside positively in consciousness” (Ahmed 44). Moreover, affect
and emotion is unconscious not necessarily in the way it is experienced but in the “process of
movement or association” that comes before the emotions (Ahmed 44). This is where Ahmed’s
concept of ‘stickiness’ comes in, because she argues that no affect or emotion is neutral, even in
its unconsciousness, because people are always inherently influenced by exterior factors such as
history and environment. Therefore, the associations made are always “bound up with the absent
presence of historicity,” but it happens unconsciously (Ahmed 45).
Understanding Massumi’s (very different) conception of affect requires us to shift our
focus from the collective to the individual. For Massumi, affect does reside in the body, or more
specifically, it exists in “the virtual”: “the pressing crowd of incipiencies and
tendencies, is a realm of potential” (Massumi 91). Affect is the unidentifiable
(because it happens too fast to see) space in between action and reaction,
where unlimited possibility exists for about half a second. Massumi argues
that this half-second is not unidentifiable because there is nothing to detect,
it is because “it is overfull, in excess of the actually performed action and of
its ascribed meaning” (Massumi 90). This bundle of excess possibilities is
what Massumi calls “intensity”, an unstable and temporal process that
