In the second Massumi reading, Massumi relates a story about how President Reagan, known as the Great Communicator, was seen as incomprehensible by patients with global aphasia and tonal agnosia. The aphasics couldn't understand words as they were and got meaning by following body language, while the agnosiacs couldn't catch tone or any extraverbal indicators, relying on grammatical form and semantic or logical content. Surprisingly, both groups found Reagan to be a poor speaker who failed to persuade. "To the aphasics, he was functionally illiterate in extraverbal cueing; his body language struck them as hilariously inept... The agnosiacs were outraged that the man couldn't put together a grammatical sentence or follow a logical line to its conclusion" (Massumi 40). Why then was he so effective to most others? Massumi reasons that Reagan was "affective, as opposed to emotional" (Massumi 40). Reagan's "jerks" as Massumi calls them, didn't inhibit his effectiveness; instead, they opened up the potential for greater effectiveness. In other words, the content of his speech didn't really matter but what mattered was what it was doing to us affectively.
I admit that I'm still lost on the concept of potentiality and how it made Reagan more effective despite his apparent incomprehensibility. Whenever I read "jerk" in Massumi, I imagined someone slamming the table during a speech to make a point (or wake up an audience). I can see how that would be effective but I don't fully understand Massumi's point that Reagan's "jerks" conveyed confidence.
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