Source
Massumi, interviewed by McKim, Inflexions 3 (2009), LIT-1905, pp. 6, 9; read in NOTE-1488.
What was actually shown
An argument from the logic of events, with examples. Affect “is not a content that can be transported from one event to another. Like all event factors, it can be repeated, reactivated, it can rearise, but always anew … It’s an event logic, not a logic of transmission or communication” (p. 9). Bodies primed by the same cue “will have been attuned – differentially – to the same interruptive commotion”. This “finds difference in unison”, unlike “imitation or contagion” (p. 6). The example is an alarm. Those who hear it respond differently, “but they will be responding differently together” (p. 6).
What this does not say
- That nothing passes between bodies. A cue, an alarm or an outburst does reach others. What Massumi denies is that the affect travels as a content; each body’s response is its own reactivation.
- That contagion never happens. Uniform response is possible, but only where “other factors must have been active to pre-channel tendencies” (p. 6).
- That the parent paper is wrong. Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy (LIT-1902) also reject transmission. Communication for them is transduction, “the continuity of action through beings” (p. 1364). But their mechanism has one process taking up “the excess action of another” (p. 1351), with indignation that “spills over into her inert colleagues” (p. 1354). Read with this account, the shared excess would be a common cue to which each process is differently attuned, not a load handed on. That reading fits the parent’s own claim that “several meanings can also coexist within a single system” (p. 1358) better than its examples do.
Connections to the record’s own argument
Added 2026-10-31 by a pass connecting the readings of Bencherki, Brummans & Vézy 2024 and the works it leans on to the record’s lines. Analogies are marked as such.
Pragmatic transport
- CLAIM-226 and CLAIM-074. Differential attunement and pre-channelling correspond, in structure, to interpreter history as a source of divergent response.
- CASE-068, by analogy only: each speaker shifted the evaluative stance and each receiver tracked it. This is content-level, not affect.
Distributed agency and individuation
- QUESTION-063: a shared cue is common drive, not coupling.
Will-organization, organizational affect and authenticity
- QUESTION-053: a further option, with its own test. It is an analogy to CLAIM-437.