Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual:

Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Duke UP: Durham, NC.
2002
“The dynamic enabling the back-formation is “intensive” in the sense that movement, in process, cannot be determinately indexed to anything outside of itself. It has withdrawn into an all-encompassing relation with what it will be. It is in becoming, absorbed in occupying its field of potential” (7).
“Cultural laws of positioning and ideology are accurate ina certain sphere (where the tendency to arrest dominates). Right or wrong is not the issue. The issue is to demarcate their sphere of applicability—when the ‘ground’ upon which they operate is continuously moving” (7).
“Passage precedes construction. But construction does not effectively backform its reality. Grids happen. So social and cultural determination feed back into the process from which they arose” (8).
“A concept is by nature connectable to other concepts” (20).
“When you uproot a concept from its network of systemic connections with other concepts, you still have its connectibility” (20).
“Their only positive conclusion emphasized the primacy of the affective in image reception” (24).
“Accepting and expanding up that, it may be noted that the primacy of the affective is marked by a gap between content and effect: it would appear that the strength or duration of an image’s effect is not logically connected to the content in any straightforward way” (24).
“the strength or duration of the image’s effect could be called its intensity” (24).
“To translate this negative observation into a positive one: the event of image reception is multilevel, or at least bi-level. There is an immediate bifurcation in response into two systems” (24).
“Intensity is embodied in purely autonomic reactions most directly manifested in the skin—at the surface of the body, at its interface with things” (25).
“Matter of factness dampens intensity” (25).
“The qualifications of emotional content enhanced the images’ effect, as if they resonated with the level of intensity rather than interfering with it, An emotional qualification breaks narrative continueity for a moment to register a state—actually to re-register an already felt state, for the skin is faster than the word” (25).
Why just skin?
“Intensity would seem to be associated with nonlinear process resonation and feedback that momentarily suspend the linear progress of the narrative present from past to future. Intensity is qualifiable as an emotional state, and that state is static—temporal and narrative noise. It is a state of suspense, potentially of disruption” (26).
“Of course, the qualification of an emotion is quite often, in other contexts, itself a narrative element and that moves the action ahead, taking its place in socially recognized lines of action and reaction” (26).
“For present purposes, intensity will be equated with affect” (27).
“Emotion is qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning. It is intensity owned and recognized” (28).
“Will and consciousness are subtractive. They are limitative, derived functions that reduce a complexity too rich to be functionally expressed” (28).
Which is why I have trouble with Massumi.
“Intensity and experience accompany one another like two mutually presupposing dimensions or like two sides of a coin” (33).
“Intensity is asocial, but not presocial—it includes social elements but mixes them with elements belonging to other levels of functioning and combines them according to different logic” (30).
“’Implicit’ form is a bundling of potential functions, an infolding or contraction of potential interactions (intension). The playing out of those potentials requires an unfolding in three-dimensional space and linear time—extension as actualization; actualization as expression. It is in expression that the fade-out occurs. The limits of the field of emergence are in its actual expression” (35).
“Affects are virtual systesthetic perspectives anchored in )functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The authomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is. Formed, qualified, situated perceptions and cognitions fulfilling functions of actual connection or blockage are the capture and closure of affect. Emotion is the most intense (most contracted_ expression of that capture—and of the fact that something has always and again escaped” (35).
“But it is also continuous, like a background perception that accompanies every event, however quotidian” (36).