Abstract
This chapter constitutes an intervention into the so-called affective turn. It centres upon a critique of the affect/emotion distinction upon which this turn ‘turns’. The chapter begins with a discussion of Raymond Williams’s concept of ‘structure of feeling’, which is used to explicate one key inspiration for a turn to affect: a distinction between ‘event’ and ‘structure’. But the affect/emotion distinction also plays out in terms of a difference between an ontological account of feeling (applicable, via Spinoza and Whitehead, to the entirety of nature) and an anthropological account. Through these arguments, the turn to affect is re-construed as the cultural emergence—still in process—of a coherent species of transdisciplinary process thought.
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Notes
- 1.
In his four-volume work Affect, Imagery, Consciousness (published between 1962 and 1991), Tomkins (1962) argued for the existence of a small number of basic biologically hard-wired affects (these include distress/anguish, shame/humiliation, fear/terror, anger/rage, interest/excitement, enjoyment/joy, surprise/startle, disgust and dissmell). The affect system is theorized as an amplifier of drive signals, and each affect hypothesized to be triggered by an innate activating mechanism associated with differential densities and patterns of neural firing. Tomkins theory thus assumes a biological reality to human affects, and gives them a key role in human psychology and culture.
- 2.
Craib (1997) suggested social constructionists suffer from a delusion that the world is constructed and at their disposal, and that this illusion functions to defend them from a confrontation with their powerlessness to explain that world. They imagine they are lucid and rational, but all the whilst their thinking is shaped and determined by the affect.
- 3.
Massumi (1995) equates affect with intensity , and contrasts it with what he calls quality. In a densely complex and controversial argument, ‘quality’ and ‘intensity’ are presented as two distinct systems which operate in parallel. Taking the example of an image of a snowman, ‘quality’ is identified with a ‘signifying order’ which indexes the experience of the image to conventionally accepted intersubjective meanings (‘this is a snowman’). The ‘intensity’ of the image , on the other hand, is identified by Massumi with the strength and duration of its effects (e.g. the effects the image has upon a person’s heart-rate or upon the electrodermal activity of their skin). For Massumi , quality and intensity are always co-present in any given situation, but follow different logics and come in different mixtures, the latter perpetually capturing the former, but never quite succeeding, since intensity always escapes its fate of being fixed by qualities. Emotion is thus defined by Massumi in relation to the capture and taming of affective intensities by way of qualities, and is associated with the higher-order processes of meaning-making, consciousness and communication that are often grasped with concepts of discourse (and semiosis more generally). Affect, in turn, is defined as an unstructured, unassimilable remainder of intensity , associated with the virtual potentialities of the autonomic nervous system, and with an asubjective and pre-personal connective logic that operates outside of consciousness and beyond the normativities of social order. Affect, in short, escapes articulation in discourse . In this way, Massumi is able to observe that approaches which take discourse as their keynote tend be concerned only with ‘quality’ at the expense of ‘intensity’ , and yet, of the two, intensity is, for Massumi , the vital factor and the unacknowledged source of novelty. Massumi’s work is thus understandable as a prolonged critique of what he sees as an endemic neglect of intensity /affect, and a plea for its decisive relevance for any understanding of the emergence of novelty in evolving systems of all kinds.
- 4.
Garfinkel’s work is a good example of a discursive approach that is very much attuned to process thought, but that—in its excitement—tends to close all doors and windows to other forms of process. This comes down to his preoccupation with structure and his grounding assumption—explicitly derived from Talcott Parsons’ ‘wonderful book’ The Structure of Social Action—that normative accountability is the guiding principle of social life (Garfinkel 1988, p. 104). Although his famous breaching experiments show an interest in situations in which there is a temporary suspension of structure , it is clear that such occasions of absence matter to Garfinkel only as exceptions that prove the rule of a structure which must necessarily and immediately return. Garfinkel and those that follow him thus profoundly neglect the liminal transitions that my book aims to foreground. The following well-known quotation is remarkable in its stiflingly authoritarian insistence on nothing but the unquestionable objective fact of perpetual structure and order:
‘For ethnomethodology the objective reality of social facts, in that, and just how, it is every society’s locally, endogenously produced, naturally organized, reflexively accountable, ongoing, practical achievement, being everywhere, always, only, exactly and entirely, members’ work , with no time out, and with no possibility of evasion, hiding out, passing, postponement, or buyouts, is thereby sociology’s fundamental phenomenon’ . (Garfinkel 1988, p. 103)
- 5.
Massumi’s 1995 article begins with a highly selective interpretation of a series of experiments that are very much within the social psychological tradition. The experiments were led by the German psychologist Hertha Sturm to investigate how psychological reactions to film can be modified by voice-overs with different characteristics. Sturm became interested in a short film shown on German TV that had excited some attention from parents because their children had been disturbed by the film. The film shows a snowman melting on the roof garden of the man who built it. The man watches and then takes it to the mountain where it can stay intact longer, and bids it farewell. The experiment involved showing this film to children under three conditions: the original film (which involved no dialogue), a ‘factual’ condition (in which a voice-over was added, giving factual statements about the action) and an ‘emotional’ condition (in which the voice-over articulated and expressed the emotional feel of the action). In each condition, the children who watched were asked to rate the film on a ‘pleasant-unpleasant’ scale and a ‘happy-sad’ scale, and they were also tested on their memory of the film. Memory was best for the emotional version and worst for the factual version, and pleasantness was highest for the original wordless version and lowest for the factual version. Massumi claims to find this muddling, although it seems obvious that a film designed to be impactful without words would be enjoyed more in exactly that form. It seems equally obvious that superimposing a dull factual narrative would both spoil it for the children and, for this very reason, make it less memorable. Also, it seems perfectly logical that adding the ‘emotional’ narrative would enhance memory on a test that requires the child to recall using language (since they have been given some workable language for this as part of the film in this condition), and might not spoil the film quite as much as the factual voice-over. Be that as it may, the result that Massumi finds truly strange is the finding that—presumably irrespective of condition—those scenes in the film that were rated most pleasant were also rated most sad. It is in order to explain this finding that Massumi elaborates his complex network of theoretical distinctions starting with content/effect and moving onto quality/intensity, mutating into redundancy of signification/redundancy of resonation and culminating with emotion/affect. Again, however, it seems quite obvious that when people (children and adults alike) view a sad film, the bits we most enjoy about it (and hence would rate as more ‘pleasant’) are precisely the sad bits, just as the best bits of a horror movie are the scenes that are scary. We are disappointed by tear-jerkers that fail to jerk tears and by horror movies that fail to scare. This finding is only ‘strange’ if it is assumed that the children cannot enjoy the sadness they feel when watching a film. Indeed, it is this assumption that seems strange to me, and not the idea that the participants might have used the ‘pleasantness’ scale to indicate their enjoyment.
- 6.
Massumi is first of all influenced by Deleuze , not Whitehead . It is important to recognize, however, that Deleuze is very much a process thinker who sought to reignite a tradition of process thought including Bergson and Nietzsche that has roots in Spinoza and Leibniz. In the ‘what is an event?’ chapter of the book on Leibniz, Deleuze describes Whitehead as ‘the successor’ or diadoche, and as the ‘last great Anglo-American philosopher before Wittgenstein’s disciples spread their misty confusion’ (Deleuze 1993, p. 76). This is a true homage to Whitehead as the inheritor of a tradition of process thought grounded in the concept of the event (or, strictly, the actual occasion).
- 7.
In a directly comparable way , James (1884) proposed that we do not run from the bear because we are scared, but that we are scared because we run from the bear. It is not a matter of a mental construction—the ‘emotion’—determining a physical course of events, but of a stream of events that are both/neither mental and/or physical (hence James proceeds to show that what we might take to be a mental emotion is composed of bodily feelings like a racing heart, sweating palms, tensed musculature, etc.).
- 8.
Interestingly enough, a distinction between affect and emotion is also drawn by Damasio, but, contrary to Massumi et al., he uses the word ‘emotion’ to denote physiological and not psychological processes. In fact, Damasio’s (2000, 2004, 2006) main message is that ‘emotion’ is distinct from ‘feeling’. ‘Emotions’ are bodily, biological processes controlled by the brain and ‘feelings’ are mental experiences of such emotions. Both taken together can be called ‘affects’. Emotions come first. They are basic homeostatic devices designed through evolution to regulate life functions. Feelings are perceptions of parts and states of the body—that is perceptions of the ongoing homeostatic life regulation that includes emotion. Feelings ‘translate’ the ongoing life-process of the body into something like mind language and in so doing contribute to life regulation on a higher level informed by consciousness . It is notable that Damasio (2004) directly acknowledges the ‘Spinozist’ nature of his theory. This different choice of terminology should warn against getting too attached to arbitrary linguistic labels like ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ and ‘feeling’ and should teach us to concentrate instead upon the concepts that these words are being used to designate.
- 9.
Having said that, two issues muddy the water here. First , for Tomkins (1962), affects work by generating a conscious report (typically a positively or negatively valenced experience/feeling that plays a motivational role), and hence there is scope for referring to this conscious dimension as an emotional experience, whilst retaining the term affect for the organic machinery underlying and occasioning the experience (see Stenner 2004). Second, Tomkins stresses that actual affective occasions rarely involve the innate affects in their pure form, but usually in complex blends and temporal dynamics bound by memory and imagination into what he calls ‘scripts’. This notion holds out much promise for understanding how affective experience becomes blended or interwoven with linguistically mediated modes of experience. For some interpreters of his work , these more complex experiences are designated ‘emotions’ in contrast to the basic affect system.
- 10.
In fact , Tomkins (1962) was one of those who engaged in a sustained but sympathetic critique of Freud’s tendency to reduce the affects to modifications of basic drives (especially the sex drive), although the old idea of drive energy (to which ideas become attached) still animates much psychoanalytic thought.
- 11.
Freud’s engagement with transference is important also because it extended the frame of the intelligible field of study of affectivity from the individual to the relationship between two people (the transference concerns the feelings a patient develops for their analyst). It is obvious that the transference cannot be understood by considering an individual alone. Others, like Bion (1961, p. 14) extended the intelligible field still further, considering the affectivity of group dynamics. This extension of the frame of intelligibility beyond the individual is a valuable aspect of the affective turn, which I will return to.
- 12.
Process thought has the potential to integrate multiple meanings of affect distinguished in this chapter. In refusing to place human experience outside of nature it calls for the fourth concept of ontological affect. It does not allocate ‘feeling’, ‘affect’, ‘emotion’ and so on to the realm of the unreal or the ‘merely subjective’. Rather, the subject is construed as that which comes into being through the process of feeling its objects (Williams’s forming and formative process, Whitehead’s actual occasion of experience , Schutz’s actio) and those objects are in turn construed as the products of this process of feeling (Williams’s formed products, Whitehead’s concretized matters of fact, Schutz’s actum). This is the territory of the sixth concept of affect as self-creation. Process thought thus construes reality itself as an unfolding and dynamic procession of relational encounters. This is the territory of the third concept of affect as transformative encounter or passage . Feeling/affect is the selective process of actualization through which the actual world becomes what it is. This is the territory of the second concept of affect as liminal vector. Since this ‘positive prehension’ (feeling the data of world) is a selective process which entails the ‘negative prehension’ of all that is not felt, so actual occasions of experience are necessarily surrounded by a penumbra of virtual potentials that are no less real for the fact of having not been felt. This is the territory of the first concept of affect as virtual .
- 13.
The neuroscientific process thinker Jason Brown (2012) describes what he calls the ‘microgenesis’ of each and every brain/mind state. The perception of any object or the production of any act is the final phase of a brain/mind state that leads from the brain’s core its surface. Such microgenesis is the becoming of the perceptual object or act, and the entire sequence is a pulse that perishes on satisfaction only to be revived, in overlapping waves, all within in a fraction of a second. For Brown (2012, p. 29) ‘an emotion is an inner or subjective feeling that is generated by the same process that deposits or actualizes an act or object, namely the micro-temporal process that leads from the archaic core of the mind/brain state to its outcome at the neocortical surface’. This challenges the old idea of discrete brain locations for discrete functions (e.g. a limbic system whose upward discharge yields feeling and whose downward discharge yields display), and shows the profound limitation of efforts to reduce experience to chemistry or anatomy.
- 14.
- 15.
Wetherell (2012) introduces the important concept of affective practices. It is notable that most of the examples she gives in the chapter in which she introduces the concept are practices mediated by liminal affective technologies or techniques. Her inspiration, for instance, comes from Goffman’s (1961) work on rituals, and other examples deal with therapy and children’s play.
- 16.
Dionysos was a God associated with wine and revelry but also death and rebirth.
- 17.
Pickard-Cambridge (1927, p. 47) traces the Dithyramb to at least the early seventh century BC where Archilocus refers to it as a riotous revel-song at Paros and ‘the fair strain of Dionysus’.
- 18.
Attribution theorists, for instance, entirely take for granted the universal nature of the actor/observer distinction without recognizing its historical and cultural conditions of emergence , and social theorists do the same when they deploy ‘dramaturgical’ metaphors based on theatre and assume them to be universal.
- 19.
This raises the question of a possible hybrid phase ‘betwixt and between’ ritual and theatre where explicitly theatrical elements might be incorporated within the religious frame of ritual (and hence be one more means of enacting and reproducing an existing version of the sacred ). But equally, such a hybrid might also catalyse an immanent critique or questioning (afforded by the new ‘distance’ between actor and observer created by theatre ) of what could then no longer be held sacred in the same way (and hence provoke a change in the ‘beliefs’ of lived culture ). In discussing an Ancient Egyptian coronation drama , Gaster (1950) used the phrase ‘dramatic ritual’ to capture the former sense of features of drama which are still firmly linked to the sphere of religion rather than literature.
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Stenner, P. (2017). This Is Not … a Turn to Affect: Feeling Between Ontology and Anthropology. In: Liminality and Experience. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27211-9_6
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