Introduction: Affect in the Scene of Writing
1. Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold.” This essay, lightly revised, became the introduction to Tomkins, Shame and Its Sisters.
2. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness, 2: 230. Unless otherwise noted, citations of Tomkins’s work will be to Affect Imagery Consciousness, hereafter AIC.
3. Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” in Touching Feeling, 133. More extensive discussions of Tomkins’s notion of theory appear in Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold” as well as in Frank, “Phantoms Limn.”
4. The phrase affective turn is from the title of a book edited by Patricia Clough, one among many publications that mark this moment in literary and cultural criticism. A very short, selected list of such publications might include Terada, Feeling in Theory; Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Cvetkovich, An Archive of Feelings; Ngai, Ugly Feelings; Thrailkill, Affecting Fictions; Clough, The Affective Turn; Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader; Wilson, Affect and Artificial Intelligence. For an essay review of some earlier work in this field that considers the motivation for the turn to affect, see Frank, “Some Avenues for Feeling.” For critiques of this turn, see Hemmings, “Invoking Affect”; Papoulias and Callard, “Biology’s Gift”; Leys, “The Turn to Affect.” For a response to Leys, see Frank and Wilson, “Like-minded.” The interest in affect and emotion crosses disciplinary boundaries, reaching across philosophy, social theory, geography, psychology, and neuroscience. There is no current consensus in the sciences or humanities on a theory of affect or emotion.
5. Winter, Freud and the Institution of Psychoanalytic Knowledge; Felman, “To Open the Question.”
6. For a useful historical approach to the idea of medium and the possibility of criticism across mediums, see Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept.”
7. See especially works by Massumi and Clough. For exceptions, see Cartwright, Moral Spectatorship; Lane, Feeling Cinema; Gibbs, “Panic!”
8. See the chapter “Freedom of the Will and the Structure of the Affect System” in AIC volume 1 for Tomkins’s emendation of Freud’s drive theory. For a comparative discussion of Freud and Tomkins, especially with regard to the ideas of repression and civilization, see Frank, “Some Affective Bases for Guilt.”
9. I emphasize that Tomkins’s writing offers affect as an object of and for understanding. Brian Massumi offers a very different approach in Parables for the Virtual, where he defines affect as unqualified intensity in sharp contrast to emotion: “An emotion is a subjective content, the sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal. 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. It is crucial to theorize the difference between affect and emotion. . . . Affect is unqualified. As such, it is not ownable or recognizable and is thus resistant to critique” (28). Where affect, in Massumi’s understanding, is presubjective and nonlinguistic, taking place in the half-second before representation and ideology have intervened, emotion is affect temporalized and domesticated by discourse and language. This emotion/affect distinction, which echoes a certain modernist rejection of emotion or sentiment in favor of an aestheticized sensation that grounds response, has the (to my mind) unfortunate consequence of making affect unavailable to qualitative criticism. By defining affect as unqualified intensity—an arousal that discourse must interpret if it is to be given quality—Massumi reintroduces the language/body opposition that the category of affect promised to suspend or complicate. Tomkins’s distinction between affect and emotion, in which affects are like basic atoms and emotions complex molecules, requires no such rigid opposition.
10. Tomkins, “Inverse Archaeology: Facial Affect and the Interfaces of Scripts within and between Persons,” in Exploring Affect, 285.
11. Tomkins’s cybernetic approach to the faciality of affect should be contrasted with approaches to the face as a display of internal states. For Tomkins, the information that the face offers is complex and difficult to assess because of our tendency to experience multiple affects simultaneously, assembled with one another and with cognitions and drive states, all embedded in complex theories and scripts. For an engaging discussion of the face as the site of affect, see Cole, About Face.
12. For Tomkins’s discussions of ideology and affect, see the chapter “Ideology and Anger” in AIC, volume 3 and the section “Affect and Ideology,” in Exploring Affect.
13. Freud, “Fragment of an Analysis of Hysteria (Dora),” 534.
14. Klein, “The Origins of Transference,” in Envy and Gratitude, 48.
15. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 465.
16. Klein, “Origins of Transference,” 54.
17. In this respect I follow Sedgwick’s use of both these theorists in her writing. See, for example, her essays “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading,” and “Melanie Klein and the Difference Affect Makes,” in The Weather in Proust.
18. On Descartes, see Roach, The Player’s Passion, 60–65. On Smith, see Marshall, The Figure of Theater; Agnew, Worlds Apart. On Darwin, see Prodger, Darwin’s Camera.
19. Unless otherwise specified, my citations to this essay are to Derrida, Writing and Difference. The quotation about affectivity is from “Force and Signification” in the same work: “The will and the attempt to write are not the desire to write, for it is a question here not of affectivity but of freedom and duty. In its relationship to Being, the attempt-to-write poses itself as the only way out of affectivity” (13). To my mind, such moral-ontological questions of freedom and duty are built out of affective elements or primitive object relations, even when they are subsequently opposed to them.
20. Johnson, System and Writing, 67. I have also found Elizabeth Wilson’s work helpful for understanding Derrida’s essay. See Wilson, Neural Geographies. Both Wilson and Johnson link Derrida’s thinking with work in the fields of cybernetics, systems theory, and connectionism in cognitive science, giving context for the transdisciplinary nature of his work.
21. Derrida, Of Grammatology, 84, 85.
22. For a different approach to Derrida and emotion, one that pursues the consequences of accepting the affect/emotion distinction and is primarily concerned with emotion as representation of self in a Cartesian theater of mind, see Terada, Feeling in Theory. For another exploration of Derrida’s use of the theatrical metaphor, see Ross, “Derrida’s Writing-Theatre.”
23. Artaud, “The Theatre of Cruelty,” 59.
24. Johnson, System and Writing, 211.
25. Artaud, “Theatre of Cruelty,” 61.
26. See Wilden, “Analog and Digital Communication.”
27. For a similar approach to the relations between on stage and off, see Güçbilmez, “An Uncanny Theatricality.”
28. I emphasize that affect is only one form of this relation to the other, a form this relation takes especially in humans and other animals with affect systems, that is, motile animals. The question of whether affect should also name this relation to the other in living organisms that do not move, or in inanimate objects, is beyond the scope of this discussion.
29. Goldberg, Writing Matter, 24.
30. Ibid., 310.
31. For an example of this earlier approach, see Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy.”
32. For an approach to Derrida’s essay that arrives at a similar conclusion about the importance of television, although along very different argumentative lines, see Clough, “The Technical Substrates of Unconscious Memory,” in Autoaffection. See too Elsaesser, “Freud as Media Theorist.”
33. Bateson, “A Theory of Play and Fantasy,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 177–93. This essay first appeared in A.P.A. Psychiatric Research Reports 2 (1955). In System and Writing, Christopher Johnson notes several conceptual similarities between Bateson and Derrida.
34. Bateson, “A Theory of Play,” 180. Bateson argues that the nip is of a higher logical type than the bite that is being simulated; translated into speech, the playful nip is saying something like “This is not a bite,” which is a higher order message than the bite itself. He then theorizes that “every metacommunicative message”—that is, every communication about communication—“is or defines a psychological frame” (188). This frame determines the interpretive relations within it since everything that takes place within the frame is supposed to be of the same logical type. Bateson insists that these metacommunicative frames are necessarily labile and can disappear: the nip can suddenly become a bite, or love in the psychoanalytic transference can become realized.
35. Here’s another example of affective metacommunication: if a child falls, and the fall is not too painful, the child will often look at his or her parent or guardian to find out how to interpret the experience. Is it an injury or simply an accident? If an accident, is it funny, distressing, or angering? Any significant pain will tend to determine the experience in favor of injury and distress, but often the parent’s expression can trigger the frame in which the child will then interpret his or her experience. Here the parent’s affect acts as a metacommunication that informs the child about how to interpret.
36. Williams, “Drama in a Dramatised Society,” 4.
37. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 8.
1 / Thinking Confusion: On the Compositional Aspect of Affect
1. Laplanche and Pontalis, The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 14.
2. Stein added the title when Leonard Woolf of the Hogarth Press agreed to publish the lecture in June 1926, just after it was delivered. The version I am using appears in A Stein Reader, 493–503. For detailed context on the lecture’s writing, delivery, and publication, see Dydo and Rice, Gertrude Stein, 77–132.
3. Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” in Lectures in America, 209.
4. Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 105.
5. As an ontological aside, I would speculate that Stein’s commitment to the liveliness of words can be read as part of a long history of nonreductive materialist theories of nature, examples of which can be seen in traditions of Epicurean atomism; in Spinoza’s monist thinking, in which all things are animate to different degrees; in some eighteenth-century vitalism; in the early Derrida’s understanding of a generalized notion of writing; and in notions of autopoiesis or self-generation as theorized by later twentieth-century biology and informed by complexity theory. Here I will simply point to research that explores such theories and their relations more fully, such as Jonathan Goldberg’s The Seeds of Things and Jessica Riskin’s recent work on Leibniz. I also observe in many of these philosophies a central concern with affect and feeling as these index a fundamental continuity between self and world. Stein’s emphasis on enjoyment, activity, and complexity recalls some central propositions and attitudes in Spinoza’s Ethics (123–31): his emphasis on joy as a mark of activity of the mind and his discussion of the composite nature of bodies and minds insofar as they take such composite bodies as objects of ideas (2: P13–P18).
6. Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” 211.
7. James had been a reader for Singer’s dissertation, submitted to the Philosophy Department at Penn in 1894, titled “On the Composite Nature of Consciousness.” The term composite appears to be linked to a turn-of-the-century problem in the philosophy and psychology in which James trained all his students, “the self-compounding of consciousness.” One analysis of this technical metaphysical problem suggests that it was also a social and political problem: how to theorize relations between individual and group consciousness. According to Francesca Bordogna, James gave up the logical principle of identity in committing to a notion of “flux,” flow, or stream, in which no boundaries separate any bit of experience from another. Stein, in her approach to composition, does not take this route; if she gives up any of the primary logical principles, it is the law of the excluded middle. See Bordogna, “Inner Division and Uncertain Contours,” 532.
Singer is best known as one of the founders of the journal Philosophy of Science (started January 1934); he was an influential teacher for later participants in the field of operations research. (Two of his students, C. West Churchman and Russell Ackoff, went on to management studies and social science work in operations research.) Thanks to my colleague Alan Richardson at the University of British Columbia for information about Edgar Singer and his context.
8. Sedgwick, Touching Feeling, 13.
9. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” in Lectures in America, 173.
10. Stein, “Paintings,” in Lectures in America, 87.
11. Arguably some key elements of Clement Greenberg’s aesthetic writings (especially his early work) are interpretations of Stein’s published lectures and her book on Picasso. I have made this argument in “Two Fat Jews: Morton Feldman and Gertrude Stein,” given at the conference Queer Performance in the Americas: 1945–1954 at Yale University, April 4, 2004.
12. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 173.
13. Hinshelwood, Robinson, and Zarate, Introducing Melanie Klein, 88.
14. Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 79.
15. Despite her public rejection of psychoanalysis, as Brenda Wineapple notes, privately Stein considered Freud “a stage one must go through.” Wineapple, Sister Brother, 316.
16. Hejinian, “Three Lives,” 286, emphasis in the original.
17. Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” 238.
18. Howe, My Emily Dickinson, 13.
19. Stein, Tender Buttons, 461.
20. Stein, “Poetry and Grammar,” 235.
21. Ibid., 236–37.
22. Stein, Tender Buttons, 470.
23. Ibid., 496.
24. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 32. See Hinshelwood’s essay on unconscious phantasy.
25. Ibid., 37.
26. Isaacs’s paper was first published in 1948.
27. Likierman, Melanie Klein, 139.
28. Ibid.; Isaacs, “The Nature and Function of Phantasy,” 277.
29. Hinshelwood, Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 34.
30. Likierman, Melanie Klein, 140.
31. Isaacs, “The Nature and Function of Phantasy,” 274, 283, 284, emphasis in the original.
32. Glover in ibid., 326, 327.
33. Hinshelwood, Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 440.
34. Klein, “Envy and Gratitude,” in Envy and Gratitude, 184.
35. Laplanche and Pontalis, Language of Psycho-Analysis, 101.
36. Interestingly the negative affect of shame is not observable at birth but, according to Tomkins, appears some time between the third and seventh month of the first year of life, around the time the infant comes to recognize the mother’s face. Also unlike what I am proposing that we think of as the “death-instinct” affects, shame works to help compose a sense of self even while it renders that self unbearably visible or exposed. For more on the compatibilities between Tomkins’s theory of shame and Klein’s depressive position, see Frank, “Some Affective Bases for Guilt.”
37. Stein, Picasso, 14–15.
38. Stein, “Portraits and Repetition,” 174.
2 / Expression and Theatricality, or Medium Poe
1. Spiegelman and Kidd, Jack Cole and Plastic Man.
2. Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion.
3. Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 9.
4. See the section titled “Restrictions of Freedom Inherent in the Affect System,” in AIC 1: 143–49.
5. Borch-Jacobsen, The Emotional Tie. For a related argument, see Chertok and Stengers, A Critique of Psychoanalytic Reason.
6. Poe, “Letter to B—,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, 11. The emphasis is Poe’s here and in all subsequent quotations.
7. Poe, “The Philosophy of Composition,” in Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews, 16.
8. Poe, Edgar Allan Poe: Tales and Sketches, 1: 310, 1: 378. The citations are to “Ligeia” and “The Man That Was Used Up.” All subsequent references to Poe’s tales are from these volumes. Because these are paginated sequentially, I omit the volume number.
9. Silverman, Edgar A. Poe.
10. See Meredith McGill’s discussion of Poe’s techniques of deracination in American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 155–164.
11. Muller and Richardson, The Purloined Poe.
12. For a reading of the facial dynamics in “The Purloined Letter” that uses Tomkins’s affect theory to locate the specific role for contempt in the dynamics of analysis, see Frank, “The Letter of the Laugh.”
13. Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit, 50.
14. For more on how Poe’s writing allegorizes and manipulates serial readers, as well as on the specifically telegraphic nature of Poe’s tales of mesmerism, see Frank, “Valdemar’s Tongue, Poe’s Telegraphy.”
15. McMaster, The Index of the Mind. Poe was likely familiar with materialist theories of expression based on physiological theories of function and potentially more integrated mind-body relations. These emerged, in part, from physiognomic theory but came to compete with the forms of theological explanation on offer, often substituting functionalist explanations for expression. See Hartley, Physiognomy and the Meaning of Expression in Nineteenth-Century Culture.
16. Ginzburg, “Clues.” See also Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire.”
17. More precisely, what so excited Tomkins and others taken by the theoretical power of cybernetics was “the capacity of certain complex physical systems, through their behavior, to mimic—to simulate—the manifestations of what in everyday language, unpurified by scientific rigor, we call purposes and ends, even intention and finality.” Dupuy, The Mechanization of the Mind, 9. The cybernetic simulation of purposive behavior seemed to obviate the need to posit mystified or reified notions of will or intention.
18. See “The Dynamics of Enjoyment-Joy: The Social Bond,” in AIC 1: 419 and following.
19. In this context see Tomkins’s corrective of the psychoanalytic use of the term anxiety to name psychic suffering generally and his proposal that “the intense form of fear now known as anxiety be replaced by the word terror, which has not yet lost its affective connotation” (AIC 3: 494). However, I suggest that the term anxiety might still be useful to describe the effect of suppression: anxiety takes place when any affect inhibits any other. This suggestion attempts to bridge Tomkins’s affect theory with various psychoanalytic definitions of anxiety in terms of internal conflict between instincts.
20. One answer to this question would characterize the tale as a case study in over-the-top Oedipal paranoia: the narrator, wracked with guilt for the crime of murder, and for whatever imagined or real transgressions preceded the murder, confesses in order to create the conditions for his own punishment. The eye, in a classical psychoanalytic reading, would stand in for the authoritative, punitive superego (or ego ideal) that the narrator projects outward and seeks to destroy. The tale’s attractions involve both the narrator’s marked success and his equally marked failure, his successful destruction of the eye followed by his confession to the crime, which ensures his own punishment. This reading, convincing as far as it goes, unproblematically accepts the Romantic equivalence of the eye and the I without explaining the substitution; it leaves out the variety of affects that the tale puts into circulation in favor of an analysis solely in terms of guilt; most important, it leaves out the reader, who, I have been arguing, is the primary object of Poe’s stories.
For readings of this tale in relation to mid-nineteenth-century psychology and notions of paranoia, see Bynum, “‘Observe How Healthily—How Calmly I Can Tell You the Whole Story’”; Zimmerman, “‘Moral Insanity’ or Paranoid Schizophrenia.”
21. See Tomkins’s discussion “Shame-Humiliation and the Taboos on Looking,” in AIC 2: 157–83. These taboos supplement those of psychoanalysis—on incest and homosexuality, or sex with the self-same, however that gets defined—with a set of taboos that do not begin with or assume a notion of sameness. For a reading of these taboos vis-à-vis Freud’s essay on the uncanny, see Frank, “Phantoms Limn.”
22. For a somewhat different approach to the question of audience embarrassment, see Ridout, Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems.
23. Smith, Theory of Moral Sentiments, 21–22.
24. The model for Smith’s scenes of sympathy or imaginative identification and judgment is the “attentive spectator” at the theater. His general definition of sympathy as “our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever” assumes that imaginative identification takes place in an interior space figured by the theater, where passions can be properly situated. See Marshall, “Adam Smith and the Theatricality of Moral Sentiments,” in The Figure of Theater. I return to Smith’s theory in relation to theatricality in chapter 4.
25. For Smith, the visual sense acts to control or regulate emotion, otherwise potentially unregulated by the communication of sound. Contemporary with Smith’s writing on sympathy were J. J. Quantz’s careful and complicated instructions for using pulsations of the heart to measure musical tempo (adagio, andante, etc.), which were initially introduced to indicate the mood or character of music but acquired meanings associated with measured time. Chronometers and metronomes using clockwork mechanisms became popular for keeping musical time in the early nineteenth century: Maelzel is the name most associated with the metronome, the same who appears in Poe’s article “Maelzel’s Chess Player.” Regulating emotion by mechanizing musical tempo becomes thinkable through these texts and machines. See Harding, The Metronome and It’s [sic] Precursors.
26. A more historicist reading of this tale could understand Poe to be exaggerating and exploding Smith’s theory of sympathy and offering a burlesque of the liberal national politics subtended by it. See Agnew, World’s Apart for Smith’s psychological system’s “resemblance to the market imperatives from which it presumably stood apart” (186). See too Jones, “The Danger of Sympathy.”
27. Warhol, Having a Good Cry.
28. This image originally appeared as a cover of the March/April 1996 issue of the comics anthology Zero Zero, ed. Kim Thompson (Seattle: Fantagraphics Books, 1996).
29. See Smith, The Poe Cinema; Smith, Poe in the Media.
30. See Elmer, Reading at the Social Limit for a theorization of Poe’s writing as exemplary of mass culture.
3 / Maisie’s Spasms: Transferential Poetics in Henry James and Wilfred Bion
1. James, What Maisie Knew, 22.
2. On this projection of gender and other questions of the ethics of reading, see Miller, “Reading, Doing,” 72.
3. Bion, Experiences in Groups and Other Papers, 29. The “Committee” here is the Professional Committee of the Tavistock Clinic that encouraged Bion to explore his techniques of group therapy.
4. Hinshelwood, Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 235.
5. For a discussion of a transpersonal space of thinking in James, see Sharon Cameron, Thinking in Henry James, especially 63–76 on Maisie. Cameron’s concern here is with “tension arising from the shifting barrier between consciousness and repression” (64), whereas my reading orients not toward a classical psychoanalytic understanding of repression but toward an object-relations approach to phantasies of the group.
6. These observations arose in the graduate seminar Affect, Print and Film held at the University of British Columbia in the fall of 2005. I am grateful to the seminar participants: Kate Hallemeier, Matt Hiebert, Matthew Kennedy, Victoria Killington, Rachel Kruger, and Peter Sun.
7. Harvey, “Kleinian Developmental Narrative and James’ What Maisie Knew.”
8. James, The Complete Notebooks, 161–62.
9. See Novick, “Henry James on Stage” for a useful alternative to Leon Edel’s version in Henry James: A Life.
10. For an example of a reading that proposes that James rejected the theater for the novel’s more intimate one-to-one relation to audience or reader, see Rosenbaum, “‘The Stuff of Poetry and Tragedy and Art.’” But see David Kurnick’s much different and, to my mind, more interesting way of accounting for James’s relations to theatricality in “‘Horrible Impossible.’” Kurnick argues that The Awkward Age (1899) should be read as “a sustained exploration of the possibilities of resisting” the form of the novel of psychological depth and suggests that James “demur[s] from the idea of interiority in favor of a model of group consciousness” (110). I am exploring one such model here, although not one that is opposed to interiority. I will return to Kurnick’s argument about Jamesian theatricality and his late style at the end of the chapter.
11. Brooks, The Melodramatic Imagination, 5. See also Levy, Versions of Melodrama.
12. See Eric Bentley’s discussion of melodrama as “the quintessence of drama” in The Life of Drama, 195–218.
13. Thanks to Michael Moon for this observation.
14. Litvak, Caught in the Act, 214. For another assessment of the central place of both shame and theatricality in James, see Sedgwick, “Shame, Theatricality, and Queer Performativity: Henry James’s The Art of the Novel,” in Touching Feeling.
15. Bion, Attention and Interpretation, 73.
16. Kurnick, Empty Houses, 112. The chapter titled “Henry James’s Awkward Stage” includes material from an essay on The Awkward Age (previously cited) as well as Kurnick, “What Does Jamesian Style Want?”
17. The Golden Bowl was directed by James Cellan Jones and dramatized by Jack Pulman.
18. Barry, “Enduring Ephemera,” 122.
19. James, The Complete Plays, 94.
20. Kurnick also explores James’s stage directions (specifically in the play The Other House [1909]) to make a related point: that they refer to “a reality conscious of its status as performatively constituted, a space in which the boundary between actress and character recedes into indistinction.” Kurnick, Empty Houses, 124. In this way James’s stage directions anticipate televisual reality, which works precisely to render indistinct the difference between actors and characters (as in the genre of reality television, itself based on the earlier game show genre). In my understanding this is primarily a consequence of the peculiar spatial scale of James’s stage directions.
21. While the recent film adaptation What Maisie Knew (2012), directed by Scott McGehee and David Siegel, succeeds in capturing aspects of James’s experiments with a child’s perspective (especially by using complex sound spaces to offer unusual angles on adult conversations), it leaves out those aspects of the novel that address Maisie’s changing relations to the adults around her over time. It would be challenging for film to span the six or eight years of the novel. I have not seen either the 1968 BBC television adaptation or Babette Mangolte’s 1976 art film adaptation of James’s novel.
4 / Loose Coordinations: Theater and Thinking in Gertrude Stein
1. Quoted in Rice, “Gertrude Stein’s American Lecture Tour,” 335.
2. Stein, “Plays,” Lectures in America, 93. Unless otherwise noted, all citations of Stein’s writing are to this work.
3. By the time of her lecture tour Stein had been writing for more than three decades and, while she had achieved significant recognition, was looking for a wider audience. When the Plain Edition, a small press set up with Toklas as publisher, was not the commercial success they had hoped for, Stein wrote The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. This was serialized in the Atlantic Monthly and published by Harper Collins in the spring and summer of 1933, and its success rapidly created the audience they had been seeking, established Stein’s popularity, and prompted the American tour.
4. Stein, Painted Lace and Other Pieces, 255.
5. Quoted in Rice, “Stein’s American Lecture Tour,” 335.
6. Rousseau, Letter to D’Alembert, 263.
7. Marshall, “Rousseau and the State of Theater,” in The Surprising Effects of Sympathy.
8. Benjamin, “What Is the Epic Theater? (II),” 304. See also Brecht, Brecht on Theatre.
9. Meyer, Irresistible Dictation.
10. James, Principles of Psychology, 2: 451.
11. Meyer, Irresistible Dictation, 23.
12. Stein, The Making of Americans, 180. For discussions of this distinction, see James, Principles of Psychology; Meyer, Irresistible Dictation; Steiner, Exact Resemblance to Exact Resemblance.
13. Stein, Lectures in America, 181.
14. Aristotle, Poetics, 10.
15. Ford, “Katharsis,” 120.
16. Bion, “Attacks on Linking,” in Second Thoughts, 93.
17. Klein, “Notes on Some Schizoid Mechanisms (1946),” in Envy and Gratitude.
18. Hinshelwood, Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 235.
19. Bion, Learning from Experience, 28–29, emphasis in original.
20. My summary is necessarily simplified, as these terms (preconception, realization) indicate. According to Bion, a thought results from the “mating” of a preconception—modeled on the infant’s inborn disposition to expect a breast—with either a positive or a negative realization, in other words, with an awareness of either the breast’s presence or its absence. Bion calls the mating of a preconception with a positive realization a “conception,” which is accompanied by a feeling of satisfaction. He calls the mating of a preconception with a negative realization a “thought,” which is accompanied by frustration. See Bion, “A Theory of Thinking” in Second Thoughts, 112. This essay was first published in the International Journal of Psycho-Analysis 43 (1962).
I would note that some of Bion’s fundamental ideas have recently been synthesized, along with insights from a handful of other areas of study (especially attachment theory, empirical studies of infants, and neurophysiology), and reconsidered under the umbrella term affect regulation. Peter Fonagy and his colleagues suggest that “a dyadic regulatory system evolves where the infant’s signals of moment-to-moment changes in his state are understood and responded to by the caregiver, thereby achieving their regulation.” This mother-child system for regulating affects becomes the basis for the development of what these writers call “reflective function” as well as “mentalization,” the foundations for what developmental psychology currently calls theory of mind. See Fonagy et al., Affect Regulation, Mentalization, and the Development of Self, 37. For a valuable critique of theory of mind from the perspective of affect theory, see Sedgwick, “Affect Theory and Theory of Mind,” in The Weather in Proust.
21. Bion, Learning from Experience, 47.
22. Gillette, “Secret Service,” 162–63.
23. Stein, Last Operas and Plays, 119.
24. Stein, Lectures in America, 122.
25. Stein, Last Operas and Plays, 91.
26. Stein, Lectures in America, 131.
27. Bion, Experiences in Groups, 29.
28. Burns, Television, 4.
29. Stein, Lectures in America, 185.
30. Ibid., 238.
31. Robinson, The Other American Drama.
32. Fuchs and Chaudhuri, Land/Scape/Theater, 2.
5 / Vis-à-vis Television: Andy Warhol’s Therapeutics
1. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 378, 379.
2. Warhol, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 92.
3. Warhol, “What Is Pop Art? Answers from 8 Painters, Part I,” interview with G. R. Swenson (1963), in I’ll Be Your Mirror, 16.
4. Angell, “Andy Warhol,” 16; Spigel, “Warhol TV,” 260.
5. Warhol’s cable series were the interview/variety shows Fashion (1979), Andy Warhol’s T.V. (1980–83), and Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes (1986–87). Two exhibition catalogues offer helpful overviews of Warhol’s use of television throughout his career: Andy Warhol’s Film and Television and Warhol TV. See the former for a selected videography (including episode lists for Warhol’s shows) and the latter for an eclectic collection of writing about Warhol and television.
6. Uhlin, “TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol,” 22, 5.
7. Hoberman, “Nobody’s Land,” 22, 21.
8. Spigel, “Warhol TV,” 253.
9. On Warhol’s queerness, see the essays collected in Doyle, Flatley, and Muñoz, Pop Out, especially Michael Moon’s “Screen Memories, or, Pop Comes from the Outside,” which offers a compelling reading of Warhol’s early Pop cartoon paintings in terms of infantile sexuality that has informed my Kleinian approach here. Other works that I have found helpful include Wollen, “Notes from the Underground”; Mattick, “The Andy Warhol of Philosophy and the Philosophy of Andy Warhol.” For an approach to Warhol and television that shares this chapter’s concerns, although in a different idiom, see Joselit, Feedback.
10. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 14.
11. Laplanche and Pontalis, “Neutrality,” in The Language of Psycho-Analysis, 271.
12. Angell, Andy Warhol Screen Tests, 45.
13. Warhol, 13 Most Beautiful.
14. For a video art piece that explores these opportunities in the public space of the subway station, see Nina Toft’s “The One I Think I Am,” http://presentationhousegallery.org/exhibition/nina-toft-the-one-i-think-i-am/.
15. Tomkins, “The Phantasy behind the Face,” in Exploring Affect, 267–68.
16. Warhol, “My True Story,” an interview with Gretchen Berg, in I’ll Be Your Mirror, 95.
17. Angell, “Andy Warhol,” 16.
18. Uhlin, “TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol,” 17.
19. Warhol, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, 91.
20. Joselit, Feedback, 116–17.
21. Uhlin, “TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol,” 18.
22. Hoberman, “Nobody’s Land,” 23; Uhlin, “TV, Time, and the Films of Andy Warhol,” 18.
23. One example of this echoing: late in the film we see the televised Sedgwick on the right sneeze, then explain that she just faked a sneeze, and repeats it; meanwhile the “live” Sedgwick also sneezes, initiating an exchange between them. The film Sedgwick then goes on to talk about blinking and the feeling of “pay[ing] attention to the little muscles” of the face and eyes. See Edgett, “What Edie Said in Outer and Inner Space,” 27–39.
24. Warhol, Philosophy, 33.
25. Warhol and Hackett. POPism, 3.
26. Hadot, What Is Ancient Philosophy?, 3, 4.
27. Warhol, Philosophy, 112. Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent citations of Warhol are to this work.
28. Hadot, Philosophy as a Way of Life, 84.
29. Warhol, Philosophy, 145, 154.
30. Foucault, The Hermeneutics of the Subject, 252. In the same work, see Gros’s “Course Context” for helpful ways of situating Foucault’s late lectures in relation to his previous work.
31. Hadot’s work tends much more quickly and easily toward the universalizing, cosmic dimensions of ancient philosophical thinking. He distinguishes his own work from Foucault’s along these lines: “In this way, one identifies oneself with an ‘Other’: nature, or universal reason, as it is present within each individual. This implies a radical transformation of perspective, and contains a universalist, cosmic dimension, upon which, it seems to me, M. Foucault did not sufficiently insist.” Hadot, “Reflections on the Idea of the ‘Cultivation of the Self,’” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, 211.
32. Wiener, Cybernetics, 22.
33. Jones, “Andy Warhol,” 41.
34. Reva Wolf suggests this in a footnote to her introduction to I’ll Be Your Mirror, 408. A fuller exposition of Warhol and cybernetics would track his relations to Marshall McLuhan’s media theory (in Understanding Media [1964] and elsewhere). McLuhan’s idea that technologies are “extensions of man,” prosthetic devices that amplify human capacities in the external environment and reciprocally modify the “sense-ratios” of human bodies, depends on a cybernetic understanding of the continuities between animal bodies and machines. Warhol was familiar with McLuhan’s ideas. In several interviews he describes his films as permitting viewers to become more “involved,” a form of attention he associates with television and a term that echoes (if not quotes) McLuhan’s assessment of television as a participant medium that involves its viewers (see, for example, I’ll Be Your Mirror, 92; McLuhan, Understanding Media, 113). Two essays that address the role of machines in Warhol’s aesthetics are Tata, “Warholian Machinehood I” and Otty, “The No Man Show.”
35. Heims, The Cybernetics Group, 23.
36. The impact of cybernetics on postwar European thinking has been the subject of a number of studies. See especially those by Christopher Johnson, System and Writing and “Derrida.” See also Lafontaine, L’Empire cybernetique and “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory’”; Liu, “The Cybernetic Unconscious”; Geoghegan, “From Information Theory to French Theory.” For the German context, see Winthrop-Young, “Silicon Sociology.” For the British context, see Pickering, The Cybernetic Brain.
37. Céline Lafontaine makes a similar point in “The Cybernetic Matrix of ‘French Theory,’” 36.
38. Foucault, Power/Knowledge, 142.
39. Wiener, The Human Use of Human Beings, 8.
40. Bateson, “The Cybernetics of ‘Self’: A Theory of Alcoholism,” in Steps to an Ecology of Mind, 315–16.
41. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 248.
42. Gros, “Course Context,” in ibid., 542–43.
43. For a critical discussion of the relations between Foucault and psychoanalysis, see Whitebook, “Against Interiority.”
44. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 207.
45. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 20.
46. Warhol, Philosophy, 5.
47. See, for example, Koch, Stargazer, 12.
48. For an interesting discussion of the space of the stage and the structural void of theatricality, see Weber, Theatricality as Medium, 9.
49. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 25.
50. Psychiatry shows up several times in POPism as a rival to queer performance practices. Consider, for example, the party Warhol was invited to attend (he brought the Velvet Underground) at the New York Society for Clinical Psychiatry (183), or his quotation of underground filmmaker Jack Smith, who acted in other people’s films for this reason: “He said that he did it for the therapy, because he couldn’t afford ‘professional help,’ and that wasn’t it brave of him to take psychoanalysis in such a public way” (40).
51. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 221, 221–22.
52. Shaviro, “The Life, after Death, of Postmodern Emotions,” 126.
53. Wallace, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again.
54. Shaviro, “The Life, after Death, of Postmodern Emotions,” 138, 138.
55. Warhol, Philosophy, 27.
56. Warhol and Hackett, POPism, 14.
57. Warhol, The Andy Warhol Diaries, xvi.
58. Foucault, The Courage of Truth, 232, 174.
59. Shea, The Cynic Enlightenment, 9.
60. Lynn Spigel makes this point when she describes Warhol’s television productions: they “deflated the scandal of homosexuality by rendering it ordinary.” “Warhol TV,” 270.
61. For a reading of this passage in relation to race and shame, see Sedgwick, “Queer Performativity.”
62. Warhol, Andy Warhol Diaries, x.
63. Foucault, Courage of Truth, 260, 261.
64. Ibid., 258.
65. Warhol, Andy Warhol’s Time Capsule 21.
Out and Across
1. Feldman, “The Future of Local Music,” 170.
2. Ross, The Rest Is Noise, 486.
3. O’Hara, “New Directions in Music,” 217. For a discussion of the difference between Feldman’s use of indeterminacy with regard to the performance and John Cage’s use of chance in composition, see Nyman, Experimental Music.