Affective Disorder

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Affective Disorder

William Egginton

diacritics, Volume 40, Number 4, Winter 2012, pp. 25-43 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University PressDOI: 10.1353/dia.2012.0018

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/dia/summary/v040/40.4.egginton.html
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AFFECTIVEDISORDER

WILLIAM EGGINTON


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DIACRITICS Volume 40.4 (2012) 24432013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

William Egginton is the Andrew W.Mellon Professor in the Humanities andChair of the Department of Germanand Romance Languages and Litera-tures at the Johns Hopkins University,where he teaches on Spanish and LatinAmerican literature, literary theory,and the relation between literature andphilosophy. He is the author of severalbooks includingHow the World Became

a Stage (2003),The Philosopher's Desire (2007), and In Defense of ReligiousModeration(2010). His next book,The Man Who Invented Fiction, will bepublished by Bloomsbury in 2014.

The recent emergence of affect as a focus of research in the humanities would appear toexhibit all the requisite elements for constituting a turn in critical parlance and focus.Numerous monographs and countless articles have taken up the topic, and several an-thologies of articles have been published in the past few years. 1 More importantly, theconcept is circulating in a number of disciplines, including political science, literary andmedia theory, and neuroscience. If affect has come into focus in response to a specificneed or urgency, it now makes sense to ask whether the term and the theoretical ad-vances it ostensibly enables live up to the promise scholars have seen in it. As I argue inwhat follows, the current deployment of the concept of affect suffers from a disjunctionbetween its potential utility and the promise projected on it by contemporary theorists.Specifically, the power of the vocabulary inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattarisinterventions of the 1970sand stemming from Deleuzes earlier engagements with thephilosophy of Baruch Spinozaimplicitly and at times explicitly invokes the promisethat a critical perspective focused on affect can avoid the pitfalls of individual subjectiv-ity and symbolic mediation in elucidating a dimension of relations between persons orbeings that is direct or immediate. To attempt to understand the functioning of affect

without recourse to subjectivity, however, is akin to studying the phenomenon of colorfree of the interference created by light. In other words, a coherent understanding ofaffect demonstrates that its dimension is properly defined by the thorough interpenetra-tion of bodies and mediation and, perhaps most strikingly, by how the limits imposed bysubjectivitys horizon of opacity in turn affect the subject in corporeal ways.

To the extent that theories of affect have hoped for new ethical possibilities to emergefrom a thinking oriented toward the affective dimension, those theories must grapplewith the paradoxes of mediation that were already central for Spinozas own attempts

to develop a system of thought void of the weaknesses he saw in that of Descartes.What early modern thinkers like Spinoza and David Hume, another early influence ofDeleuzes, intuited was how ethical questions are, by their very nature, inextricablybound to the subjects blindness as to the desires and intentions of others and, ultimately,to important aspects of his or her own as well. While the transmission of affect is bothreal and a profoundly important quality of communication, the question the human be-ing faces of what I ought to do not only cannot be relieved by such communications, itrebounds mercilessly on the affects and remains a relentless engine of our affective lives.

>> The Promise of Affect

While the concept of affect is important in a number of fields, its recent popularity inthe humanities can generally be traced to two sources: Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and AdamFranks use of the theories of Silvan Tomkins, 2 and the above-mentioned engagementwith the Deleuzian-Spinozist tradition that was refueled in the mid 1990s by BrianMassumis article, The Autonomy of Affect, later included as the lead essay in his 2002book, Parables for the Virtual .3 In this essay I focus exclusively on the second trajectory,


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as I do not see Tomkinss theory or its adherents as being motivated by the same con-cerns, which I will now outline. 4

Patricia Ticineto Clough gives an excellent sense of the appeal of writing about affectin the opening pages of her introduction to The Affective Turn . The scholars contributingto the volume,

treat affectivity as a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, inexcess of consciousness. For these scholars, affect refers generally to bodily capacities to

affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a bodys capacity to act, to en-gage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alivethatis, aliveness or vitality.5

Like other principal voices in the new affect theory, Clough is careful to assure the readerthat the shift of critical attention toward the affective register does not entail a replace-ment for or exclusion of attention paid to the important role played by meaning, identity,subjectivity, and the individual in understanding human sociality. It is hard not to detect,however, a lingering note of hope accompanying almost all claims staked by affect theory

to occupy a middle ground engaging equally the body and the mind or involving bothreason and the passions, 6 a hope that the new critical vocabulary will go beyond medi-ating such dualisms and break new ground altogether. Massumi writes in the introduc-tion to his watershed Parables for the Virtual about the motivations for his project:

It was based on the hope that movement, sensation, and qualities of experience couchedin matter in its most literal sense (and sensing) might be culturally-theoretically thinkable,without falling into either the Scylla of nave realism or the Charybdis of subjectivism andwithout contradicting the very real insights of poststructuralist cultural theory concerning thecoextensiveness of culture with the eld of experience and of power with culture. The aimwas to put matter unmediatedly back into cultural materialism, along with what seemed mosdirectly corporeal back into the body.7

Key to this explanation is the negative adverb prominently at work in the last sentence.Massumi begins his book with a critique of humanists previous attempts to introducethe body and its matter into their debates, but only ever as mediated by discourse : Thebody was seen to be centrally involved in these everyday practices of resistance. But thisthoroughly mediated body could only be a discursive body: one with its signifying ges-tures. 8 The recourse to the body as a mediated construct, he argues, fails to return tothe body at all, for if such bodies are involved in sense as meaning, sensation is utterlyredundant to their description. Or worse, it is destructive to it, because it appeals to anunmediated experience. 9

A goal, then, of Massumis intervention is to offer a corrective of a corrective, to re-orient a turn to the body that ended up not being about the body back to the body, andnot just as an effect of cultural mediations of one sort or another. In doing so he preemptsthe critical reaction that his position appeals to an unmediated experience, and does so

not by repudiating that appeal, but by locating the reason for that reaction in one poten-tial consequence of the appeal, namely, subjectivism, and then repudiating that. In other


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Affective Disorder>> William Egginton 27

words, Massumis appeal to the immediate is not to be confused with the immediacywe might attribute to an individual distinguishing between what is directly available tohis or her senses and what he or she can only access through the mediation of anothersreport. On the contrary, in a vocabulary he derives from Gilbert Simondon, affects arepre-individual. 10 From this perspective, the subjects consciousness or emotional stateat any one time is the actualization or subtraction from its virtual field of possibilities:

Affects arevirtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually

existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participationin the virtual.Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which itescapes connement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is.11

The autonomy of the essays title refers, then, to affects escape from the capture ofindividuation; the virtual is the realm of its theoretical concern, a realm not bounded byan individual subjects actual borders. Thus, while Massumis invocation of the im-mediacy of affect appears to be a response to a disingenuous return to bodies and mat-ter that was really about how we only ever have mediated access to bodies and matter,

its promise in fact lies elsewhere, namely, in the invocation of a realm of feeling or ex-perience not limited by an individuals subjective sphere. 12 This is why the vocabularyhe develops has been embraced by scholars seeking a kind of liberating move from, inCloughs words, a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, represen-tation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from privileging theorganic body to exploring nonorganic life. 13 Indeed, Massumi himself notes that, in Si-mondons analysis, self-reflection, once regarded as the exclusive domain of the human,extends to all living things, though, he goes on to say, it is hard to see why his own

analysis does not force him to extend it to all things, living or not.14

One of the potential advantages of identifying a realm of experience exceeding indi-vidual, subjective, or even human bounds is that it opens the possibility of an approachto understanding aspects of otherness traditionally held to be obscured from our knowl-edge. Diminution or shifting of the barriers of epistemological privilege associated withsubjectivity implies the possibility of modes of communication and understanding thatsurpass limits once thought of as absolute. Such possibilities have immediate ethicalramifications. If I now know what it is like to be a bat, this fact has implications for howI ought to treat a bat, and likewise for any value replacing bat. 15 Theories regarding thetransmission of affect lay implicit claim to such a paradigm shift, a kind of heterophe-nomenology 16 that has long been the dream of artificial intelligence and neuroscience,and was once the presumed future even from Freuds outlook. But what form could suchknowledge take? What would it mean to know what it is like to be another, and doesthe concept of affect bring us any closer to that knowledge? While it may seem that Ihave shifted the discussion back to a set of concerns that affect theory has pointedlyrepudiated, it turns out that the conceptual apparatus of affect as set out by Spinoza wasinspired by precisely such questions; that is to say, the turn to affect was always about the

challenge of subjectivity.


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>> The Challenge of Subjectivity

In a recent article tracing the genealogy of affect theory to Spinoza, Caroline Wil-liams identifies the key utility of the concept for political thought: Affect is also de-subjectifying in an important respect as for Spinoza it is also a kind of force or powerthat courses through and beyond subjects. Thus, it cannot easily be inscribed within theborders of subjectivity. 17 By refusing to confine the discussion of political agency andmanipulation to the desires, motivations, and identifications of a subject, the concept ofaffect as derived from Spinoza purportedly allows for a more nuanced, complete under-standing of how subjects communicate and influence one another within the body poli-tic, and how political subjects come to be in the first place. This is certainly an importantinsight, given that subjects dont arrive on the political scene fully formed but ratheroriginate in given political realities that exceed them and are largely formative of them.Specifically, Spinozas model permits an understanding of the subject and its ideas as amaterial extension of the body politic in both space and time:

Thus, Spinoza writes that the human mind perceives a great many bodies together with thenature of its own body (E II Prop 16 Cor 1). Spinoza further considers how the recollectioof one experience may trigger imaginative associations with similar ones. In this way, imagnation, image and memory are intimately tied to affective and corporeal existence. Further-more, there will always exist an unconsciousaffectus imitatio within the process of imaginaryidentications constituting a political body as citizens of a demos, a nation and so on. Thusif we imagine something like us to be affected with the same affect, this imagination wilexpress an affection of our Body like this affect (E III Prop 27 Dem).18

In other words, contrary to the notion of a well-bounded subject working its will andbeing influenced in various ways in the crowded polis, the Spinozist model defines themind as the idea the subject has of its body, a body itself constituted by its affections,present and past. Neither the body, the past of that body, nor the realm of others con-stituting its present can fail to exist or, for that matter, be considered secondary to thesubject, because they are presupposed as the very object of which the mind is the idea.

In writing the Ethics , Spinoza was proposing a profound and far-reaching solution towhat he saw as a fundamental problem in the leading philosophical system of his day.If some of his earliest published writings were critical responses to Ren Descartes, the Ethics was an attempt to rewrite ontology and epistemology after Descartes so as to pro-pose a foundation for political and ethical knowledge. The problem Spinoza sought torectify stemmed from Descartess distinction between corrigible and incorrigible knowl-edge. In Descartess example, if I see a chimera, I may rightly doubt that what I am see-ing is a chimera, but I cannot doubt that I am seeing something I take to be a chimera. 19

The distinction is essential because it grounds the entire system of substances, res cogi-tans being based on what one cannot doubt, res extensa on what one can. While God isinvoked to stitch the network together, 20 Descartes still leaves an enormous philosophi-

cal question mark on any attempt to ground a politics or ethics, since the very existenceof a world outside the subject has to be taken on faith.


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In the first of his two books on Spinoza, published in 1968, Deleuze explains howDescartes rejected the exaggerated pretensions of a synthetic approach to knowledge infavor of a more modest analytic approach that, by eliciting a clear and distinct percep-tion of the effect . . . provides us with a means of inferring from that perception a trueknowledge of the cause. 21 As Deleuze goes on to argue, Spinoza refuses Descartess as-sumption that the synthetic method must make real knowledge of things in the worlddependent on abstract universals. For Spinozas synthetic method, by contrast, the for-mal cause of an idea is never an abstract universal; rather, the formal cause of a true

idea is our power of understanding, which permits thought to go from one real beingto another without passing through abstract things. 22

Descartess difficulty comes when he concedes that he has no way of knowing thatthe creator made him such that what he perceives clearly and distinctly (incorrigibly)is in fact correct, which follows from the assertion that we cannot in fact know Godthrough Himself. Despite this difficulty Descartes insists that we can come to have cer-tain knowledge of Gods existence by accurately attending to the inferences that lead usfrom what we know clearly and distinctly to that belief. To this Spinoza dryly remarks in

an early critical commentary on Descartes, this answer does not satisfy some people,23

and goes on to propose his own answer. His response, in contrast to Descartes, deniesthat we can have certainty of anything other than our own existence without first hav-ing a clear and distinct concept of God that makes us affirm that he is supremely vera-cious. 24 Spinozas twist, then, is to undermine the viability of Descartess key distinction.Clear and distinct ideas of the kind upon which Descartes founds all knowledge can, infact, serve no foundational role without an equally clear and distinct concept of God. Butif knowledge of God and knowledge of our senses attain to the same level of clarity anddistinction, there is in fact no internal or essential limitation to knowledge at all, no linein the sand between what may be known clearly and distinctly and what is barred fromsuch epistemological privilege.

The demolition of this distinction is, of course, exactly what attracts Deleuze, forwhom, Spinozism cannot be considered apart from the contest it carries on againstnegative theology. He continues, Spi-noza condemns not only the introductionof negativity into being, but all false con-ceptions of affirmation in which negativityremains as well. It is these survivals thatSpinoza finds and contests in Descartesand the Cartesians. 25 The negativity thatDeleuze, via Spinoza, repudiates in Des-cartes is nothing other than the epistemo-logical privilege of subjectivity. While this privilege can be and has been cast as affordingthe subject a kind of independence from the world, as when Descartes used it to groundthe distinction between thinking and extended substance, it is nonetheless important to

recognize that independence does not necessarily follow from the fact of epistemologi-cal privilege. But for Spinozaunder the influence of Descartess arguments but desiring

The negativity that Deleuze, via Spinoza,repudiates in Descartes is nothing otherthan the epistemological privilege ofsubjectivity.


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to affirm the possibility of certain knowledgeundermining epistemological privilegewas a necessary step in eradicating dualism.

To the extent that Spinozas arguments, and by extension Deleuzes as well, attack thepretensions of subjectivity or consciousness to autonomy and power, there can be no dis-agreement. Certainly Spinoza was insightful in the extent to which he grasped the limitednature of conscious thought in relation to what remains unthought. In Deleuzes words,

It is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge that we have of it,and that

thought likewise surpasses the consciousness that we have of it . . . . In short, the model of thebody, according to Spinoza, does not imply any devaluation of thought in relation to exten-sion, but, much more important, a devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: adiscovery of the unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound asthe unknownof the body .26

A powerful attraction of Spinozas philosophy is, for Deleuze, the intent he sees there tothrow off an illusion; an illusion that consciousness creates to calm its anguish at be-ing aware of only effects; an illusion that consciousness itself is its own cause; an illusion

that, taken to its extreme, culminates in the anthropomorphization of God.27

Spinozasethics is built on a new network of understanding that undermines or replaces the un-derstanding consciousness thought it had, but that was based on false principles. Thusdoes ethics come to replace morality, where morality was the judgment of God, 28 noth-ing but an illusory replacement of existence with transcendent values.

Spinozas move, as we have seen, was to recognize that the subject is unthinkable asan independent entity, and from this recognition to build up a system or ladder explicat-ing all the links constituting deus sive natura , thereby exposing the proper place andorientation of a persons ethical life. 29 The theory of affects and affections is crucial inthis regard because it is the operative mechanism allowing Spinoza to bridge the chasmof Descartess corrigibility problem. If my perception or idea is necessarily one I have ofmy body, and that body is constituted by affections past and present, there can be no neatdistinction between what I can and cannot doubt, and hence no division of substances.In Rei Teradas words, affection appears, affect separates from it, climbs, is expressed,and half of it falls back into phenomenality while the other half remains in ontology, arealm like that of Deleuzes later consciousness without experience. 30

To the extent, then, that modern affect theorists since Deleuze have located in theconcept a kind of escape from subjectivity, they have been absolutely correctin theory.Subjectivity, however, is not merely a philosophical problem but also an existential one.While it is salutary to propose a theory that solves the philosophical problem by recon-ceptualizing the subject, it is also essential to recognize the existential problem that re-mains: reconceptualizing the subject does not and cannot alter the fact of the constitu-tive limitations structuring a subjects experience and knowledge of itself and others.These limitations are an inherent concern for any discussion of ethics, and have a vitalrole to play in affective life as well.


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>> The Heteronomy of Affect

There is no doubt that affects can indeed communicate, and that they do so in ways thatare often or even mostly imperceptible to consciousness. Indeed, aesthetic experience is,in some sense, entirely based on the transmission of affect through media. And neurosci-ence is making inroads into understanding how the brain reacts affectively to aestheticand social stimuli. In one recent study that underlined how imperceptible the modesof the transmission of affect can be, it was demonstrated that the scent of a chemical in

womens tears had a depressing effect on male sexual arousal. 31 While the associationof tears and the affective reduction of arousal may be unsurprising, that a pheromonicmedium works directly at the hormonal level in addition to any cognitive grappling withthe reasons behind the tears could certainly be considered news. Affects are capableof transmission through multiple means,in fact, and it is thus perfectly plausiblethat Spinoza, without the benefit of mod-ern neuroscience, presciently attended to

something like mirror neurons when hewrote that if we imagine something likeus to be affected with the same affect, thisimagination will express an affection ofour Body like this affect. 32

The point, then, is not to deny that anenormous and highly complex affectivelife contains and far exceeds the bound-aries of subjectivity; this is both true andreason enough in itself to justify all the attention that the affective turn entails. Rather,what is crucial to emphasize is that extending the language of subjective experience tonon-subjective or pre-individual phenomena or even nonorganic and inanimate matterdoes nothing to enable those who are subjects to escape from the capture of subjec-tivity. On the contrary, the capture of subjectivity is constitutive of ethics and is itself apowerful motor of affective life.

As I mentioned at the outset of this essay, to the extent that there has been an affectiveturn in recent years that turn has been felt in several fields of inquiry, and the brain sci-ences may stand out as the most obvious of these. Researchers such as Antonio Damasio,Joseph LeDoux, and Jaak Panksepp have contributed to the neurosciences understand-ing of how the brain produces emotion, and how pervasive emotions are in mental life. 33 In Damasios parlance, what I have been referring to as the affective dimension of expe-rience would encompass both emotions and feelings, where emotions are the physicalor externally detectable substrate of affective experience and feelings are the internal,private aspect as experienced by the subject. Like Deleuze, Damasio identifies Spinozaas an important influence and cites with approval his notion that the mind is an idea

Extending the language of subjectiveexperience to non-subjective or pre-individual phenomena or even nonorganicand inanimate matter does nothing toenable those who are subjects toescape from thecapture of subjectivity.


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whose object is the body. 34 In this version of Spinozist parallelism, emotions wrack thebody, and feelings are the idea of those emotions in the mind.

While feelings are conscious, in that we are aware of them, they can pertain to whatDamasio calls core consciousness and not yet be narrated or identified with the lin-guistic markers used by the more self-aware extended consciousness. 35 That said, whatDamasio and other neuroscientists share is the conviction that the human brain is toocomplexly networked to allow for any facile distinctions between aspects of experiencethat are independent of cognition, just as cognition free of emotional influence is almost

unthinkable. 36 As Panksepp puts it,

no single psychological concept fully describes the functions of any given brain area or circuit. There are no unambiguous centers or loci for discrete emotions in the brain that donot massively interdigitate with other functions, even though certain key circuits are essentiafor certain emotions to be elaborated. Everything ultimately emerges from the interactionof many systems.37

Adrian Johnston adds, commenting on this quotation from Panksepp, He subsequently

links this fact to emotional phenomena, emphasizing that the brains mind-bogglinglyintricate internal interconnectedness makes it such that emotions are inextricably inter-twined with non-emotional (that is, cognitive and motivational) dimensions. 38

The point, however, is not merely to stress how the findings of contemporary neuro-science undermine theoretical efforts to isolate affective life from the influence of suchhigher-level cognitive functions as consciousness; far more vital is the evidence of howtightly imbricated the affects are with that specific aspect of subjectivity I have identi-fied as being the core nemesis of Deleuzian affect theory: namely, the negativity of subjectivity that characterizes epistemological privilege. Brain researchers have adopted ina variety of forms the taxonomy of emotions proposed by Sylvan Tomkins, which origi-nally included the eight basic emotions: surprise, interest, joy, rage, fear, disgust, shame,and anguish. 39 While variations have been suggested by neuroscientists and psycholo-gists specializing in emotions, most influentially Paul Ekman, 40 the consensus is that hu-mans share a series of basic emotions with lower animals, but the derived or nonbasicemotions tend to be more uniquely human. Since the derived emotions are constructedby cognitive operations, they could only be the same to the extent that two animals sharethe same cognitive capacities. 41 It does not take a great conceptual leap to see how eventhe basic emotions may be intricately associated with the orientation and location of asubjects self, its relation to others, and its inability to directly experience the feelingsand desires of those others. Joy involves contentment with the limits of the self and arelaxation of attentiveness as to how those limits could expand or be impinged on; rageoften arises in response to impingements of limits, such as slights to the ego; sadnessarises from loss of a beloved object, or from the sense that the other does not love or de-sire the subject; shame is produced when something is exposed that the subject wishedto keep hidden from others. The relation is even clearer with more complex emotions:

love and desire involve expanding the limits to incorporate the other; hate involves the


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urge to retract those limits and reject otherness; and envy regards something the otherhas that we desire to take for our own. In all cases, while there is no doubt that the emo-tions are thoroughly physical, an ineradicable dimension of the affective experience isthe horizon of opacity that characterizes subjective experience. To cite a fanciful ex-ample from Hume, were humans really to know the intention and desire of the other, tohave hearts undivided between their interests and those of others, many of the affects wetake for granted would never be invoked. 42

To push the point further, a God-like omniscience could not experience affects

because it would lack a subjects horizon of opacity. The very same logic led ImmanuelKant to deny God the possibility of mak-ing an ethical choice, for the very idea ofethics requires desire (which God couldnot have) and a lack of knowledge as toeither others intentions or the futureconsequences of my actions. 43 What isrequired for an ethical act is the commit-

ment to act according to the right maxim, one derived solely from duty and irrespectiveof my inclination. But we need not be Kantian deontologists to see that any meaningfuldistinction defining ethical behavior from natural motivations requires the mediation ofotherness, at the very minimum in the form of a question regarding the others desiresand intentions.

In a fascinating experiment studying the ability of chimpanzees to engage inaltruistic behavior, researchers presented chimps with two plates containing differ-ent amounts of food. Chimps were asked to point to a plate, and when the plate theypointed to was the larger (as it invariably was), it was given to another chimp andthe first received the smaller. While this led to a tremendous amount of howling andcomplaining on the part of the chimps, after hundreds and hundreds of trials, thesechimps could not learn to withhold pointing to the larger reward. 44 This result onlychanged when the chimps were taught some basic numeric symbols, which were thenshown to them instead of the plates. With the aid of symbolic mediation, a kind ofthird-party intervention between the chimp and the object of its hunger, the chimpsimmediately learned to select the smaller portion in the hopes of eventually receivingthe larger one themselves.

While the numeric symbol clearly relativized the immediacy of the loaded plates, italso may have had the effect of creating a kind of cognitive representative of the othersdesire in the chimps brain. At its most basic, in other words, what a symbol can do iswhat Jacques Lacan said of the signifier in general, that it represents the subject foranother signifier. 45 The numeric symbol in this case had the effect of subjectifying thechimp. It represented the chimp as a cipher, a signifier for another, and represented thatother as a cipher for the chimp. A basic reasoning process was thus enabled, more or lesstranslatable as: what do I choose such that the other does what I want?itself a question

ultimately based on a more fundamental one: what does the other want of me? 46 The

A God-like omniscience could notexperience affects because it would lacka subject's horizon of opacity.


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key here is to grasp how the deployment of symbolic mediation in the service of selfishgoals has the side effect of opening the question of the others desire. The fundamentalhorizon of opacity defined by the question is thus the necessary foundation of any and allethical behavior, as well as a powerful motivator of affective experience.

>> The Theater of the Soul

That we cannot experience first hand the perceptions and thoughts of another is an

existential fact; but how that fact is articulated, understood, and perhaps itself experi-enced may well be subject to cultural and historical variation. The early modern debatesaround affective transmission that I have referenced thus far are united in conceiving ofthe problem in terms of what I have called theatricality. 47 The pervasive cultural pres-ence of the new theatrical institutions in early modern Europe provided a ready vocabu-lary and template for conceptualizing the experience of epistemological privilege, suchthat when Descartes located the foundation of philosophical inquiry in the very borderbetween those ideas we can know clearly and distinctly and those we cannot, he could

not help conceptualizing the problem in terms easily translatable from the skills andpractices populaces could call on to engage with the theater. 48

Descartess influence, as we have already discussed, was key to the development of atheory of subjective exceptionalism and independence that sparked the reaction of suchthinkers as Spinoza and Hume, who in turn inspired Deleuze and the recent affectiveturn based on his thought. The image of thought that became the touchstone for thesedebates was that of the human mind or subject as a kind of theater, in which the phe-nomena of the world passed before the self like characters on a stage, making referenceto an inaccessible world outside the theater and unified by a kind of meta-audience orspectator within. Hume writes in his monumental A Treatise of Human Nature , Themind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance;pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations. 49 But Humes goal in that text is precisely to dispute the inference from the theatricalmetaphor that the mind, like the theater, must be a unified place, and that the self mustthereby precede and center the constant flow impressions that, in Humes view, in factconstitute it: There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different;whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. Thecomparison with the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptionsonly, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, wherethese scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composd. 50

It is not surprising that Deleuze would cite this passage in his early book on Hume,going on to gloss, the place is not different from what takes place in it; the representa-tion does not take place in a subject. 51 It is important to note, however, that the questionof whether a subject in any sense precedes or is constituted by a flux of impressionsis entirely independent from the essential aspect of the theatrical metaphor, namely,

that those impressions are not taken to be complete on their own but rather stand in for


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something not present, and somehow inaccessible. Furthermore, if the coherence of asubject over time is indeed merely the product of associations, as Hume argues, Humealready intuits in his great work the extent to which the inaccessibility of others impres-sions is vital to the organization and deployment of that seeming coherence.

In his analysis of how the sense of self over time is produced by the association ofimpressions, Hume reduces the essence of that coherence to what he calls the principleof resemblance between an image and its object, where the image refers to the tracesof our memory, a faculty, by which we raise up the images of past perceptions. 52 Inso-

far as multiple similar perceptions occur successively, the fact that these images mustresemble their object makes the whole seem like the continuance of one object. . . . Inthis particular, Hume concludes, the memory not only discovers the identity, but alsocontributes to its production, by producing the relation of resemblance among the per-ceptions. 53 What is most fascinating in this analysis, however, is how the idea of object permanence can only be supported by the same kind of fantasy projection we havealready seen operating in Hume. The principle of resemblance between rememberedimages and the objects they represent works to produce both the identity of the object

and the identity of the observer and, as he insists, the case is the same whether we con-sider ourselves or others; however, the entire thought experiment is prefaced by thisconditional: suppose we coud see clearly into the breast of another, and observe thatsuccession of perceptions, which constitutes his mind or thinking principle. 54 Why doesHume need to posit this counterfactual prior to arguing for the centrality of resemblancein the production of identity? Precisely because the principle he is defending is no moreaccessible than the experience of that other whose mind the thought experiment seeksto explain. In both cases what is instrumental in producing temporal coherence or syn-thesizing impressions over time is our inability to see into the others breast, as well asthe very horizon that inability raises separating our experience of the object from howit is in itself or, which is the same thing, how it might be perceived by a being who is notlimited in the ways we are. What is an impression? An image, an infinitely thin sliver of time? An affection of thebody, Deleuze says, and then defines the mind with Hume as the assemblage of theseimpressions. The assumption does away with the need for something, another faculty,to connect two disparate moments: association . . . is a rule of the imagination and amanifestation of its free exercise. 55 Kant will also make association a rule of the imagi-nation, but will add that its free exercise is only part of the imagination (spontaneity); 56 the imagination also synthesizes disparate impressions under the unity of the concept,and it is this operation that renders any kind of experience possible. 57 In fact, inspiredprecisely by the challenge of Humes empiricism, Kant will stipulate the dependenceof the synthesis of experience over time on the opposition of two content-independentfulcra, an object = X underlying all possible objects of cognition and the subject of ap-perception unifying the various subjective impressions. 58 My experience of the world isfiltered through the existential fact that I cannot experience it as others do, a fundamen-

tal question that implicates my own desires and affective life with the question of others


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desires. For if the impressions that are thus unified are mine, that is only the case insofaras those of another do not belong to me. 59

Then again the question may be, Deleuze writes after rejecting the theatrical modelof the subject, how does the mind become a subject? 60 The mind becomes a subject byincorporating the other. It does this by representing the other with a signifier, and repre-senting itself with a signifier for another signifier, all of which permits, indeed forces thequestion of whether my perceptions correspond to what in fact is there, that is, whethermy clear and distinct ideas can be extended to the world. Thus does Humes compari-

son of the theatre become entirely apropos: the comparison of theater becomes a wayof figuring this divide of the other in us; it is the way, in the early modern context, thatthe mind becomes a subject. The idea of the theater is apt not because it implies an ex-terior space for the assemblage of images, but because of the institutional division itengenders between bodies and the characters they portray. Theatricality becomes one,powerful and yet historically specific, version of the epistemological privilege, and the

theater, much like print, cinema, or thedigital image in their own ways, becomes a

fundamental medium not merely a way inwhich humans communicate, but a funda-mental form of human embodiment. 61

Thus when Adrian Johnston empha-sizes the second-order nature of affectivelife, such that in some sense feelings arealways the feelings of feelings, we can seethe implications of this notion of funda-mental mediation for affective life. 62 I only

feel my feelings insofar as they are already to a minimum degree other to me, an other-ness that constitutes them as my feelings at the same time as it constitutes me as the onewho feels them. None of which is to say that I am not a body first and foremost, or thatmy conscious existence is not subtended and supported by an unconscious of the bodythat far exceeds it, as Deleuze puts it. Rather, it is to insist that the fundamental medi-ating apparatus of subjectivity thoroughly co-implicates with affective experience, andthat the theatrical divide Deleuzian affect theory and its philosophical forebears seek toovercome remains an ineradicable element of the very experience to which they turn inthe hopes of doing so.

>>

As we have seen, a great appeal of Deleuzian affect theory has been its promise of akind of short circuit between experience and bodies that bypasses subjectivity and itsattendant limitations 63the ego, ethnocentrism, gender bias, the list goes ontouchingon an implicit ethical dividend, insofar as subjective capture seems counterproductive

to real engagement with otherness in almost any form. But as weve also seen, the same

The theater, much like print, cinema, or thedigital image in their own ways, becomesa fundamental mediumnot merely a wayin which humans communicate, but afundamental form of human embodiment.


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early modern attempts to ground ethics in experience that so influenced Deleuze revealin striking detail how the limits of subjectivity cleave to the problem of ethics at its verycore. In fact, not only does it seem impossible to link the transmission of affect to anethical project without the mediation of subjectivity, subjectivity and its inherent auto-alienation may well be intrinsic to affective experience. At its best, the turn to affect hasreminded theorists of communication in all its forms, from the political to the psycho-logical to the literary, that when humans communicate they do so through their bod-ies, and that the affective dimension of this embodied communication often exceeds the

grasp and dominion of cognitive processes. But as often occurs with intellectual trends,the enthusiasts of affect have at times overstated their case, asserting a promise for theirtheoretical endeavors that not only exceeds their possibilities, but also undermines thevery real pertinence of neurological studies of affect to vital questions in philosophy,psychology, and the study of literature, art, and culture. It behooves us, in the end, notto consider affect as an opponent to subjectivity, but instead to understand how deep-ly related the two are. I feel, therefore I am, 64 wrote the Cuban novelist and theoristAlejo Carpentier in the context of his El recurso del mtodo ( Recourse of Method ), a novel

whose rationale from the title onward is a parody and response to Cartesian thought; towhich one can only note how even this most basic expression of the primordial kinshipbetween feeing and being seems sutured, at its core, to that solitary vowel that marks thesubjects feeling minimal exclusion from the surrounding world.


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Id like to thank Ling Hon Lam for inviting me todeliver a paper in the Space of Emotion workshop atWellesley College, and James Noggle for his insight-ful response to that earlier version of this paper.

1 To note titles briey and very selectively, someof which I will deal with in greater depth below: twocollections, Clough and Halley,The Affective Turn andNeuman et al.,The Affect Effect ; Panksepp, AffectiveNeuroscience; Terada,Feeling in Theory ; and Mas-sumi,Parables for the Virtual . Two of my colleagues atJohns Hopkins, Ruth Leys and William Connolly, haverecently engaged in a debate in the pages ofCritical

Inquiry around the question of the turn to affect.Much of the debate turns on the extent to which thethinkers Leys criticizes share a mistaken commit-ment to the idea of a presumed separation betweenthe affect system on the one hand and signicationor meaning or intention on the other, as Leys putsit in her reply to Connolly (Affect and Intention,800). In what follows I also reassert the dimension ofsignication, intention, and specically subjectivity asinextricably entwined with affect, although I also ndevidence for support of this position in at least someof the thinkers Leys most overtly criticizes.

2 See, for example, Sedgwick and Frank,Shameand Its Sisters, and Sedgwick,Touching Feeling.

3 This genealogy is also traced by Gregg andSeigworth in their introduction toThe Affect TheoryReader , 5.

4 I should also note that plenty of scholars haveavoided the Deleuzian vocabulary for very similarreasons to those I discuss in this essay. Katrin Pahl, forexample, writes about emotionality instead, claimingthat, to use affect in the sense dened by Deleuzeand Guattari, that is, as non-conscious and non-linguistic experience of intensity, appears not to beuseful if one wants to explore the overlap of rationalityand emotionality, as well as insist on the textual andself-reexivethat is, self-augmenting and self-

attenuatingcharacter of emotionality (Emotional-ity, 549).

5 Clough, Introduction toThe Affective Turn, 12.

6 Hardt, Forward toThe Affective Turn, ix.

7 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual , 4.

8 Ibid., 2.

9 Ibid.

10 Massumi references Simondon,Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique andLindividuation psy-chique et collective for these arguments. It is importantto note that neither Simondons work nor the deploy-ment of his concepts necessitates the conceptual leapI am tracing in Massumis argument. Mark Hansen, tocite one example, has effectively adopted Simondonsvocabulary for the purposes of a new phenomenologyof images in the digital age: Simondon has expandedthis conception by treating affectionor what he pre-fers to call affectivityas the mode of sensation thatopens embodied experience to that which does notconform to already contracted bodily habits. It doesso, Simondon claims, because it mediates betweenthe domain of the individual (i.e. whatever comprisesthe already individuated human organism) and thedomain of the preindividual that comprises thedomain of metastability conditioning all processes ofindividuation (Hansen, Affect as Medium, 207).

11 Massumi,Parables for the Virtual , 35; emphasisin the original.

12 The same is true of the ostensible potentialof affect theorists to skirt meaning even while, wepresume, writing meaningfully about it. For KathleenStewart, affects work not through meanings per se,but rather in the way that they pick up density andtexture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas,and social worldings of all kinds. Their signicancelies in the intensities they build and in what thoughtsand feelings they make possible. The question they

Notes


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beg is not what they might mean in an order ofrepresentations, or whether they are good or bad in anoverarching scheme of things, but where they mightgo and what potential modes of knowing, relating, andattending to things are already somehow present inthem in a state of potentiality and resonance ( Ordi-nary Affects, 3).

13 Clough, Introduction toThe Affective Turn, 2.Again, the use of the concepts of affect theory neednot promote such dichotomies. In another essayHansen uses the conceptual apparatus of affecttheory to explore, as he calls it, the apparent paradox

of contemporary subjectivity: the fact that technicalexpansion of self-affection allows for a fuller and moreintense experience of subjectivity, that, in short, tech-nology allows for a closer relationship to ourselves, fora more intimate experience of the very vitality thatforms the core of our being, our constitutive incom-pleteness, our mortal nitude (The Time of Affect,589).

14 Massumi,Parables for the Virtual , 36. I should

be clear that I nd nothing inherently wrong withthis move, as long as it is acknowledged and framedaccordingly. For instance, Jane Bennett, in a seminalarticle in the journalPolitical Theory , focuses herattention on what she terms the recalcitrance ormoment of vitality in things in order to give voice toa less specically human kind of materiality, to makemanifest what I call thing-power. She goes on tospecify, I do so in order to explore the possibility thatattentiveness to (nonhuman) things and their powerscan have a laudable effect on humans. (I am not ut-terly uninterested in humans.) In particular, might, asThoreau suggested, sensitivity to thing-power inducea stronger ecological sense? (The Force of Things,348). Bennett adopts the language of human agencyand experience in discussing the realm traditionallyknown as inanimate precisely so as to trouble settleddistinctions of human/nonhuman and living/nonlivingthat unconsciously determine attitudes and behavior

toward the environment.

15 The choice of mammal derives, obviously, fromThomas Nagels inuential essay. What Is It Like toBe a Bat?

16 Dennett, Whos On First? Heterophenomenol-ogy Explained.

17 Williams, Affective Processes without a Sub- ject, 246.

18 Ibid., 256. Quotations may be found in A Spi-noza Reader , 129 and 168 respectively.

19 Descartes,Meditations on First Philosophy ,2526.

20 Ibid., 47.

21 Deleuze,Expressionism in Philosophy , 159.

22 Ibid., 161.

23 Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader , 72.

24 Ibid., 73.

25 Deleuze,Expressionism in Philosophy , 165.

26 Deleuze,Spinoza, 1819; emphasis in theoriginal.

27 Ibid., 20.

28 Ibid., 23.

29 In Teradas suggestive formulation: Spinoza setsabout explaining how adequate ideas could come toexist by building a kind of ladder out of the distinc-tions between affections and feeling affects, betweenkinds of feeling affects, and between all affects andadequate ideas. Affect is heuristically important be-cause it faces both in and out, and therefore clinchesthe univocity of expression ( Feeling in Theory ,11718).

30 Ibid, 119.

31 Pappas, Scent of a Womans Tears Lowers

Mens Desire.


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32 Damasio identies mirror neurons with his ownas-if-body-loop, the process by which the brainsimulates certain emotional body states internally( Looking for Spinoza, 115).

33 In addition to Damasio,Looking for Spinoza, seehisDescartes Error , The Feeling of What Happens, andSelf Comes to Mind . See also LeDoux,The EmotionalBrain, and Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience.

34 Damasio,Looking for Spinoza, 12.

35 At the same time, Damasio ventures that coreconsciousness and some level of emotion are directly

correlated ( The Feeling of What Happens, 100).36 For precisely this reason no facile distinction canbe drawn between contemporary neuroscience andthose philosophers and theorists who defend a stron-ger role for rationality and intentionality in emotionallife, such as Martha Nussbaum and Robert Solomon.See Nussbaum,Upheavals of Thought , and Solomon,Not Passions Slave.

37 Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 147. To avoidreinventing the wheel, suffice it to say that after afew decades of shifting debates between what couldbe generally called judgment theories of emotionsand affect theories, the former emphasizing the roleof cognition in generating emotional responses andthe latter their bodily or affective dimensions, manyreasonable voices seem to be settling on some ver-sion of this position. Jenefer Robinson, for example,criticizes judgment theory but offers a new model that

emphasizes the arousal of emotions as a multi-step(albeit very fast) process, beginning with a noncogni-tive affective appraisal but overlaying that almostimmediately with cognitive evaluations ( Deeper thanReason, 41).

38 Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Hap-pens, 91.

39 LeDoux,The Emotional Brain, 11213.

40 Ekman,Emotions Revealed .

41 LeDoux,The Emotional Brain, 114.

42

Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles ofMorals, 84.

43 All three notions, however, that of amotive, ofaninterest , and of amaxim, can be applied only tonite beings. For they all suppose a limitation of thenature of the being, in that the subjective character ofhis choice does not itself agree with the objective lawof a practical reason; they suppose that the being re-quires to be impelled to action by something, because

an internal obstacle imposes itself. Therefore theycannot be applied to the Divine will (Kant,Critique ofPractical Reason, 100).

44 Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 319.

45 Lacan,crits, 694.

46 Ibid., 693.

47 This argument is advanced in myHow the WorldBecame a Stage.

48 Egginton,How the World Became a Stage, 124.

49 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 301.

50 Ibid.

51 Deleuze,Empiricism and Subjectivity , 23.

52 Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 308.

53 Ibid.

54 Ibid.

55 Deleuze,Empiricism and Subjectivity , 24.

56 Kant,Critique of Pure Reason, 257.

57 Ibid, 249.

58 E.g., ibid., 233, 251.


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59 This is why Sartre was driven to incorporate thegaze of the other so centrally in his own phenom-enological system: my apprehension of the Otherin the world as probably being a man refers to mypermanent possibility ofbeing-seen-by-him; that isto the permanent possibility that a subject who seesme may be substitutes for the object seen by me(Sartre,Being and Nothingness, 345). The inuenceon Lacans whimsical illustration of the gaze in hisfamous anecdote of Petit-Jean is clear: the shermanpoints to a sardine can oating in the water and tohis great amusement asks the young and somewhatless amused Lacan, You see that can? Do you see it?

Well, it doesnt see you! (Lacan,The Four Fundamen-tal Concepts of Psychoanalysi s, 95).

60 Deleuze,Empiricism and Subjectivity , 23; em-phasis in the original.

61 See Wegenstein,Getting Under the Skin, esp.chapter 4, The Medium is the Body. Hansen alsoemphasizes the irreducibility, as well as the privilege,of bodily mediation in the experience of time as

self-affection (subjectivity) (The Time of Affect,590). He makes this point in the context of a readingof Bernard Stieglers notion, inspired by Derrida,that technological mediation is already functional atthe most basic levels of subjective experience. SeeStiegler, Derrida and Technology.

62 Johnston, Affekt, Gefhl, Empndung, 257.

63 To choose one of many passages: A radi-cal empiricism, if it is to be a thorough thinking ofrelation, must nd ways of directly, affectively joiningthe infraempirical to the superempirical (Massumi,Parables for the Virtual , 16).

64 Carpentier,El recurso del mtodo, 309.

Bennett, Jane. The Force of Things: Steps towardan Ecology of Matter.Political Theory 32, no. 3(2004): 34772.

Carpentier, Alejo.El recurso del mtodo. Mexico City:Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1974.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley.The Af-fective Turn: Theorizing the Social . Durham: DukeUniversity Press, 2007.

Connolly, William E. The Complexity of Intention.Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 79198.

Damasio, Antonio R.Descartes Error: Emotion, Rea- son, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994.

.The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emo-tion in the Making of Consciousness. New York:Harcourt Brace, 1999.

.Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the FeelingBrain. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003.

.Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the ConsciousBrain. New York: Pantheon, 2010.

Deleuze, Gilles.Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essayon Humes Theory of Human Nature. New York:Columbia University Press, 1991.

.Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York:Zone Books, 1990.

.Spinoza: Practical Philosophy . San Francisco:City Lights, 1988.

Dennett, Daniel. Whos On First? Heterophenom-enology Explained. Journal of ConsciousnessStudies 10, nos. 910 (2003): 1930.

Descartes, Ren.Meditations on First Philosophy . 3rded. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis:Hackett, 1993.

Egginton, William.How the World Became a Stage: Pres-ence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity .

Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky.Touching Feeling: Affect,Pedagogy, Performativity . Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 2003.

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Affective Disorder