Introduction

Headless Capitalism

The New Cogito: “I Feel, Therefore I Am”

In 1999 Slavoj Žižek warned that the liberal academy should grant the Cartesian subject a stay of execution. Charged with colonial Europe’s rationalized crimes against humanity, the Cartesian subject had come to shoulder the burden of racism, heterocentrism, sexism, elitism, imperialism, teleology, master narratives, and phallogocentrism, the linguistic vehicle of this totalizing oppression. In the cultural studies–dominated intellectual aftermath of global decolonization, reason became the worst discursive criminal of the modern West. The rational political subject born of the mid-seventeenth-century cogito of transcendent mind had fallen into seemingly irreparable disgrace. Yet, when a prescient Žižek saw in neoliberal culture a rising leviathan that would bring the already debilitated left to its knees, he was clinging to the Cartesian subject as though it were the last hope: if the left were to stand a chance in this epic battle, it had better not turn its back on reason. In 2007 Al Gore, too, publicly lamented the loss of reason within the political sphere, decrying its “assault” by neoconservative politics of fear and greed. How curious that, although both Gore and Žižek sought the rehabilitation of a common fallen hero, each blamed the diametrically opposed end of the political spectrum for its demise.

These defenses of reason from attacks issuing from both extremes of the political spectrum suggest that the rejection of rationality is not the exclusive work of any given political camp but rather a phenomenon far more culturally hegemonic. If reason has been demonized and abandoned by both the political left and right, it is because a new avatar of social agency has begun to emerge: affect. My proposition is simple: that we may currently be witnessing the radical apogee of an epistemic shift from reason to affect, a shift that may have only become fully visible in the present era of “one-world” capitalist globalization, but that we can trace to the birth of free-market capitalism in the age of revolution.

We tend to think of capitalist practice and discourse as one of expansionist and neocolonizing growth. Yet I argue that in its revolutionary genesis capitalism—together with liberal democracy—validates the bourgeois body politic as the new site and source of economic and political power that is always already self-contained and autonomically self-governing within its own limits and constructs itself epistemologically on the model of immanent and foundationally affective homeostasis. When liberal democracy and free-market capitalism move beyond their revolutionary inception to become players in a world theater dominated by imperialism, the rational and expansionist epistemological discourse of outward growth overshadows the discourse of harmonious equilibrium—though it could also be argued that the two discourses of growth and homeostasis are complementary in that episodic expansionist growth is balanced by a continual return to a necessarily contingent state of homeostatic equilibrium. Whether we view growth and homeostasis as competing or complementary epistemological discourses, what I wish to argue most centrally is that once the imperialist world system comes to an end along with the cold war, the discourse of capitalist-democratic homeostasis markedly eclipses that of growth, and with this shift affective logic begins to supersede its rational counterpart.

Indeed, in the years immediately following the fall of the Soviet Union, an event that Francis Fukuyama heralded—albeit infamously—as proof of the universal triumph of liberal democracy, affect began to come into view as the driver and protagonist of cutting-edge research and innovation in academic and public cultural discourse alike, freely traversing this terrain. If we take stock of the diversity of these interventions by affect as a vehicle for the construction of knowledge—the exercise of thinking of and through affect—then we begin to appreciate the extent to which affect has had the effect of creating a field of inquiry unified in this respect across disciplines and ideologies. With particular intensity over the past two decades, affect (understood as both topic and optic) has been forging an epistemological immanence of inquiry—not at the micro level of specific content, but at the macro level of the constitution of a transformative discourse that is pushing toward the radical redefinition of fields and their foundational theoretical assumptions and tools.

In 1995, for example, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick championed the insertion of affective discourse within theoretical currents as a nonlinguistic alternative mode of signification that quietly and defiantly bypassed the Cartesian subject’s prison house of rational discourse. In Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader, Sedgwick and her coeditor Adam Frank imported the groundbreaking mid-century work of the eponymous psychologist in affect and cognition for use in queer studies, introducing to the humanities the unorthodox idea of feeling as the basis of subjectivity. This markedly liberal and contestatory use of affect notwithstanding, it is essential to note again that, like the demise of reason, the rise of affect on the cultural horizon has not been the monopoly of any one political perspective. To wit, whereas Sedgwick borrowed one psychologist’s theorization of affect to reconceive marginalized social identity, another psychologist’s theorization of affect propelled the reconceptualization of identity within the decidedly conservative economic mainstream: with Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ—also published in 1995—Daniel Goleman caused a minor revolution in the business world, where suddenly affective skills were heralded as more accurate markers of professional success than raw brain power. Time magazine featured the story and baptized this form of intelligence “EQ” (Gibbs).

Yet a third title from 1995, neurologist Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain, pioneered the concept and study of what would come to be known as “grounded cognition,” a model of affective or “hot” cognition that stands in opposition to the “cold” cognition of reason (see, e.g., Barsalou). Against the grain of Cartesian dualism—and against disciplinary convention that rejected emotion as a nonsubject of scientific investigation—Damasio argued that affect (defined as a sequence proceeding in complexity from sensory perception to emotion to feeling) underlies and ensures competent reasoning. Healthy reason is dependent upon healthy affect; where sensory-emotional-feeling capacities are irrevocably compromised, rational capacities, in turn, suffer an equally irrevocable debilitation, particularly in the areas of decision making and planning for the future.

In Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Damasio maps a model of the feeling brain in which he locates affective process within homeostasis, the mechanism of self-regulation that drives toward well-being—i.e., health, whose emotional face is happiness—as the natural point of equilibrium.¹ In this theory of affective process, the senses, emotions, and feeling are ascending rungs on the ladder of homeostasis. The human autonomic system, Damasio argues, is crowned by feeling, which he defines as a mental map of the body’s emotional state—a form of consciousness that is nevertheless nonrational.

By way of caveat, I would like to emphasize that I am not debating the empirical merits of Damasio’s characterization of affective process as homeostatic, but rather reading his intervention in the brain science of emotion as a cultural text that participates in and further confirms a pattern of the generalized privileging of affect whose major coordinates I am here trying to map out in a culturally diagnostic mode. In this light, although it is true that Damasio seeks to elaborate a mind-body continuum inspired by the philosophical thought of Descartes’s contemporary Baruch Spinoza in which affective and rational systems are mutually interdependent, it is nevertheless fair to say that affect is really the star of Damasio’s work (just as Spinoza has displaced Descartes as the star of an established strain of contemporary politico-cultural theory).² Affect, Damasio asserts, is the foundation of the human condition. The furthest reaching implication of this radical shift in neurological perspective is to usher in a new “cogito.” Indeed, a New York Times review of Looking for Spinoza is titled, simply, “I Feel, Therefore I Am” (Eakin).

This new cogito seems to issue forth from every area of social life. Artificial intelligence has moved away from binary computation and toward the analog programming of human emotion. Psychologist and Silvan Tomkins disciple Paul Ekman has published a new critical edition of Charles Darwin’s virtually forgotten The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) in which Ekman vindicates Darwin’s characterization of affective communication through facial expressions as a hard-wired and universal “language of the emotions.” Ekman went on to achieve media representation by actor Tim Roth as Dr. Cal Lightman on the Fox television series Lie to Me, an exploration of the truth as ciphered in emotional microexpressions, which ran for three seasons. Advertising has begun to plumb recent work in psychology and neuroscience on this alleged universality of the emotions for its relevance to marketing; a simple online search will turn up both a lengthy list of titles in business studies literature purporting to exploit emotion for commercial advantage and an array of conferences convened in recent years for the purpose of disseminating and refining those strategies of emotional exploitation.

The biggest food and drink companies in the world have adopted the mantra of affect: McDonald’s launched its first worldwide campaign in 2003 under the slogan “i’m lovin’ it” (“McDonald’s”); Coca-Cola followed suit with “happiness in a bottle” in 2006 (“Welcome”). Subaru of America, Inc. was named “Automotive Marketer of the Year” for 2008 by Mediapost.com in part for its “Love. It’s What Makes a Subaru, a Subaru” and “Share the Love” campaigns (“Mediapost.com”). Politics have adopted analogous emotional brandings. In 2004 George W. Bush won his second term in office on the strength of a so-called—albeit tacit—politics of fear; Barack Obama triumphed in 2008 with a campaign explicitly defined by “hope” (Organizing).³ Political scientist Drew Westen argues in The Political Brain that the electoral process is, in fact, motivated by affective rather than dispassionate choice. Strategies of political lobbying also reflect this affective shift, for example in regard to the movement to overturn California’s illegalization of same-sex marriage in Proposition 8, which has adopted the slogan “love conquers H8.” In an edited volume of cultural criticism, Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley have diagnosed the contemporary circumstance as one that has taken an “affective turn” in which the social is only intelligible when viewed through the lens of affect.⁴

Likewise, theories of the affective are springing up with particular intensity in media studies. These theories examine the media’s appeal to the senses, a perspective neatly summarized in Vivian Sobchack’s postulate that “our aesthetic and ethical senses merge and emerge ‘in the flesh’” (1) and further exemplified in Laura U. Marks’s characterization of global media and consumer culture as a “portable sensorium” (243), Brian Massumi’s reading of mediated affect in the form of “parables for the virtual,” and Linda Williams’s definition of hard-core pornography as a “frenzy of the visible” (36). These theorists push toward an ontological understanding of affect as foundational to the experience of media culture, making an interpretive tradition—or even school within media studies—of Gilles Deleuze’s late-blooming writings on cinema from the perspective of an affective temporality, that is, a narrative experience apprehended as such by the sensory perception of a passage of time.⁵

Whereas this strain of media studies theory focuses largely on the relationship of affect to form and reception (Marks proposes the metaphor of the “skin” of the film; Massumi insists on the “intensity” of representation), we would also do well to interrogate the ways in which affect shapes narrative itself—that is, the way we approach storytelling. Two recent films are of special interest in this regard, for they revisit canonical cultural figures—both notorious “men of words”—and cast them as men of feeling. In Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004), Jesus’s extended and notoriously graphic pain encapsulates his scriptural teachings. In Walter Salles’s Diarios de motocicleta (The Motorcycle Diaries, 2004), the young Ernesto Guevara metamorphoses into the revolutionary “Che” not by evincing a capacity to give reasoned attacks on the asymmetries of neoimperialist capitalism, but rather by giving himself over in a profoundly somatic love to the oppressed of Latin America, which he accomplishes by conquering the debilitating pain of what the film’s narrative codes as a fundamentally bourgeois asthmatic condition. No longer do teachings and long speeches characterize these enduring cultural icons. Their significance is reaffirmed in the stoic endurance of agony; their relationship to pain for the sake of love tells the story that used to be reasoned in words.

This cinematic rendering of cultural narrative—and politics—as affective finds a striking echo in the words of the insurrectionary Subcomandante Galeano, formerly Marcos, who makes a pithy formulation of political agency as the rights “to opine, and to feel, and to dissent” (“a opinar y a sentir y a disentir”; Galindo and Muñoz, emphasis added). Where we might expect—in the rationalist tradition of social agency that Gore and Žižek struggle to uphold—to find reasoning as the bridge transforming opinion into political self-expression, we instead find feeling as the motor driving activist political intervention.

Furthermore, the ways in which we have begun to narrate and represent our social selves and how we know those selves and the world around them now hinge on our capacity to feel. As a model of meaning, affect-as-episteme rests on the notion of homeostasis; hence, well-being and its opposite—“ill-being”—become its poles of evaluative judgment. In an economy of meaning epistemically centered on affect, the force of social denunciation is carried by sadness, pain, and disease; social affirmation by joy, pleasure, and good health.

I have proposed that the phenomenon I am examining represents an epistemic shift. We may remember that in “The Confession of the Flesh” (“Le jeu de Michel Foucault”), Foucault defines the episteme as a function of a second term, the apparatus. This latter term denotes “a thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions” (194) that we should understand as a “formation which has as its major function at any given historical moment that of responding to an urgent need” (195). If the apparatus, then, embraces “the said as much as the unsaid” (194) in pressing all its heterogeneous elements into the service of “a dominant strategic function[ality]” (195), then the episteme is the “specifically discursive” (197) avatar of this apparatus. “I would define the episteme retrospectively [for its first use comes in the 1966 Order of Things] as the strategic apparatus which permits of separating out from among all the statements which are possible those that will be acceptable within, I won’t say a scientific theory, but a field of scientificity, and which it is possible to say are true or false. The episteme is the ‘apparatus’ which makes possible the separation, not of the true from the false, but of what may from what may not be characterised as scientific” (197).⁶

Yet, for Foucault, the organizing principles of the episteme are inherently bounded by reason. I propose here that we break with that assumption in order to contemplate the possibility that we are witnessing on a broad cultural scale—from the representational to the empirical—the full-blown emergence of an episteme inherently bounded by affect. If we take inventory of our epistemological tools for conceiving of and delimiting the possible coordinates of human knowledge, we will find them critically amassed around an affective center that throws over the transcendent mind and thought for the immanent soma and feeling. In the affective epistemological landscape, feeling becomes “thought” in a knowledge of self and world produced through nonrational means.

We lack as yet an adequate vocabulary to express the idea of embodied knowledge, one that does not conjure up at every turn the specter of Cartesian rationality. For, within the cultural straits of the Enlightenment, affect has been the long-standing and abject obverse of reason. The very notion of an affective cogitation, judgment, or analysis seems most immediately oxymoronic because these faculties are so firmly associated with reason as to repudiate the possibility of affect-as-episteme in and of themselves. Yet contemporary cultural discourse presents us at every turn with bodies that cogitate, judge, analyze through sensory perception, emotion, feeling. Felt realities, sensed truths, guts that advise and hearts that remember, tears and smiles are what have begun to reconstitute social discourse along the semantic axis of affect. From this wide-ranging cultural discourse and the necessarily partial representation that I have given to it herein as a kind of epistemological symptomatology (of both the representational and the empirical, the tropological and the ontological), I have extrapolated a composite definition of affect as the prerational set of dispositions toward the self in the world given by sensory perception, emotion, and feeling, a set of dispositions that constructs a somatic knowledge organized on the autonomic principle of homeostasis. Organicity as a logic of organization, emotional disposition as a form of moral judgment, internal equilibrium as a means of analysis (through the constant tally of positive and negative affects and somatic states of being as ease or dis-ease): these are what Foucault would call the “rationalities”—again, the problem of vocabulary—of an epistemically affective approximation of being in the world.

There are many different affects—these understood, moreover, on an imprecise continuum from the empirical to the tropological. The discussion of affect in the singular is not meant to reduce this diversity to a monism except to signal the possibility that we might speak of an all-encompassing epistemic mode in which meaning is produced in a way that sharply contrasts with its production by reason. To take a concrete example of the potential utility of thinking through the implications of this shift, we might consider the twentieth-century treatment of culture, for example, in which we make a decisive switch of paradigm from one of hierarchy to one of relativism. If we analyze the epistemological currency of each position, we see that the former hierarchical model corresponds to a taxonomizing tendency that is racialized, as Mary Louise Pratt discusses (31–33), and guided by a vertical and transcendent power dynamic informed by epistemic reason. The latter relativist model, on the other hand, emerges in the aftermath of decolonization as a remediation of colonialism’s cultural hierarchies and corresponds to an egalitarian tendency guided by a horizontal and immanent power dynamic and informed by epistemic affect. In the remainder of this introduction, I will flesh out these two terminological constellations—reason, verticality, and transcendence, on the one hand, and affect, horizontality, and immanence, on the other—in conjunction with colonialism and free-market capitalism, respectively. This analysis builds upon other considerations of the relationship between emotion and capitalism, arguably foremost among them Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional Capitalism, in which Eva Illouz posits the preeminence of emotional logic as a function of capitalism. I seek here to consider the epistemological reach of that logic and to theorize its genesis.

Headless Free-Market Capitalism

If we seek out modern origins of affect-as-episteme, we might, as a starting point, first consider how the Reformation challenged the vertical hierarchy of the Catholic Church, a hierarchy that we could productively view as analogous to the verticality of Cartesian dualism, in which a transcendent and exalted mind governs an immanent—and abjectly residual—body. Let us take the Religious Society of Friends, the Quakers, originating in the mid seventeenth century, as an apt example of how we might understand the Reformation to have metaphorically taken the governing “head” off of the religious body. If, a century earlier, Martin Luther had rejected the authority of the Pope, dispensed with confession, and lobbied for the free interpretation of the Bible, then Quakerism took this initial dismantling of Catholic hierarchy to a plane of full horizontality. Most significantly, the fundamental tenets of Quakerism hold that there is no mediation necessary between individuals and God—no priest, no minister, no preacher—and, moreover, that divinity is manifest in the form of an “inner light” within every living being. Quakerism does away with institutional hierarchy and establishes a perfectly horizontal relationship between the faithful. In fact, declared faith is not even requisite for the natural enjoyment of equal access to God: the inner light is universal and germane to life itself. The Quakers thus give the transcendent godhead a thoroughly somatic rendering in a somaticization that represents the social conviction of absolute equality between all people and constitutes a conceptual act of democratization ahead of its time. In a 1661 treatise on proper business conduct, Society of Friends founder George Fox emphasizes love as the ultimate guiding principle for transactions of exchange, signaling emotional harmony as the rule and measure of social harmony.⁷ The very terminology of the sect itself indicates a horizontal rather than vertical disposition of relationships defined by affective bonds among members. Conceptually, the belief in an inner light joins humans together from within, creating an organic, immanent, and perfectly democratized totality. The result is a feeling soma that has dispensed altogether with the need for a thinking head.

In the Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber defined the “spirit of capitalism” as the wholesale cultural application of Protestant vocation—the concept of a “calling”—to the pursuit of profit. But where Weber interprets this pursuit of profit as “continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise” (5), famously insisting on the rationalizing character of capitalism, I wish to reiterate the proposal that we entertain a productive discrepancy between capitalist discourses of colonizing expansion and democratizing immanence. If, indeed, capitalist expansionism is rationalizing and produces what contemporary sustainability critics have called an ideology of “growth”—expansive in an infinite linearity—then I would like, for a moment, to hold the consideration of this rationalizing ideology in abeyance, as a posterior and diachronic development to which we will later return, and in the meantime to examine capitalism’s originary discursive definitions and justifications, which posit a different model of capitalist intercourse as a kind of organic homeostasis—an immanent harmony of the sum total of interconnected and integrated parts produced through nonrational self-regulation to maintain the healthy order and functionality of the whole as a kind of eternal (atemporal, ahistorical) circumstance equivalent to the circumstance of life itself.

Where Weber dedicates himself to the analysis of what I would consider the rational imperialist discourse of capitalism, I propose to analyze its revolutionary discourse of affective immanence. From this perspective, in full consonance with Weber’s central claim, I posit that the Quaker soma finds its economic analogue a century later in Adam Smith’s invisible hand (Theory; Wealth). In departure from Weber, however, I would like to turn my attention to the ways in which this consonance is constructed of an affective—rather than rational or rationalizing—conceptual fabric. Just as the Quakers envision an inner light connecting the religious body politic, Smith’s writings evince a conceptualization of capital as the substance that flows organically through the social body politic. Just as the Quakers reject the institutional hierarchy of church and exogenous God, Smith likewise rejects the institutional trappings of military colonialism as a top-heavy redundancy in favor of a strictly economic relationship with Britain’s American subjects. The Quakers locate authority and divinity within the illuminated body; Smith locates power within the flow of capital itself. Although the concept of laissez-faire had already been a hundred years in the making—coinciding with the robust expression of the Reformation and the robust development of commerce with the New World—it is Smith’s writings that seminally theorize free-market capitalism.

If Smith theorizes free-market capitalism in 1776, then it is the revolutionary American bourgeoisie that brings it into being that same year under the political mantle of liberal democracy. In the logic of monarchy the bourgeoisie had been economically endowed through commerce but politically subaltern; in undertaking the self-ordained passage to sovereignty, the subaltern needed a conceptual logic to accompany and legitimize that change of social station. Here Nicole Eustace’s Passion Is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution explains the role of affect in accomplishing that legitimization. Eustace argues that it was a tectonic shift in the cultural status of emotion that underwrote the bourgeois revolutionary cause: whereas in the early modern culture of monarchical Europe, emotion had been rendered conceptually abject through association with the vulgar body politic, in the years preceding the American Revolution emotion was redeemed as a universal aspect of the human condition and exploited discursively as a means of defining that same formerly subject body politic—within whose ranks, after all, the bourgeois elite nevertheless found itself with respect to the monarchy—as a new and legitimate sovereign political force.⁸

Contemporaneously, Smith proposes a model for an economic sovereignty that, likewise, has a systemic—and not hierarchical—derivation. In other words, the economic sovereignty Smith proposes is one that does not need a crown or an empire; in fact, this kind of hierarchical apparatus is precisely what threatens to impede the optimization of capital flow. In tracing out what will optimize capital flow, Smith creates a narrative of organizational dynamics that echoes the trope of affective universality Eustace argues is all-important to the success of the American Revolution.

I approach Smith’s construction of this universality in two passages that I will consider in the composite: one on morality and the other on the distribution of wealth, both of which, in consonance with Eustace’s analysis, evince a vision of the human condition as one of universal organicity in which there is a perfectly democratic distribution of morality and wealth, as though these two were not only homologous resources but innately—and definitionally—human characteristics. Universal morality (the conceptual platform for a democratic model of governance, following Eustace) and universal access to resources along a homeostatic model of democratizing organic flow—from all parts through all parts of the universal soma—obey the same epistemological dynamics in Smith’s thought. (If we read Smith with one eye to the present—considering Smith a starting point for an uneven but continuous trajectory of affective discourse through to the current global moment—we will also readily appreciate how his notion of a universal soma traversed by a flow equally moral and economic resonates strongly with Damasio’s model of homeostasis as an affective form of nonrational somatic self-regulation. Reading the two authors side by side shows how Damasio’s model of affective homeostasis appears in effect as the biological counterpart, two centuries later, of Smith’s model of the moral-economic homeostasis of the capitalist body politic.)

In the Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759)—the foundation for his capitalist treatise The Wealth of Nations—Smith claims that morality is an intrinsic part of the self-interest that famously drives human nature and capitalism alike (this last pair posited, as always within capitalist discourse, as a homology). It is with this fundamental assertion that Smith opens his disquisition on the moral sentiments:

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner. That we often derive sorrow from the sorrow of others, is a matter of fact too obvious to require any instances to prove it; for this sentiment, like all the other passions of human nature, is by no means confined to the virtuous and humane, though they perhaps may feel it with the most exquisite sensibility. The greatest ruffian, the most hardened violator of the laws of society, is not altogether without it.

(13)

The self-interest, then, that moves the capitalist machine, is not at odds with the moral sentiments—empathy, sympathy, feeling for others—but inextricably bound together with them. This morality—this capacity for a social life of emotions—is portrayed emphatically by Smith as a universal attribute, a characteristic proper to the human condition.

For Smith, nature mirrors this equitable distribution of morality in the equitable distribution of resources, which, in spite of an asymmetrical distribution of wealth, nevertheless achieves a perfect symmetry in its support of humans irrespective of class difference:

The produce of the soil maintains at all times nearly that number of inhabitants which it is capable of maintaining. The rich only select from the heap what is most precious and agreeable. They consume little more than the poor, and in spite of their natural selfishness and rapacity, though they mean only their own conveniency, though the sole end which they propose from the labours of all the thousands whom they employ, be the gratification of their own vain and insatiable desires, they divide with the poor the produce of all their improvements. They are led by an invisible hand to make nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants, and thus without intending it, without knowing it, advance the interest of the society, and afford means to the multiplication of the species. When Providence divided the earth among a few lordly masters, it neither forgot nor abandoned those who seemed to have been left out in the partition. These last too enjoy their share of all that it produces. In what constitutes the real happiness of human life, they are in no respect inferior to those who would seem so much above them. In ease of body and peace of mind, all the different ranks of life are nearly upon a level, and the beggar, who suns himself by the side of the highway, possesses that security which kings are fighting for.

(215, emphasis added)

Making our way back to the analysis of the invisible hand as the key figure of the homeostatic principle foundational to epistemic affect, here it guides the wealthy to play the part of nature by “mak[ing] nearly the same distribution of the necessaries of life, which would have been made, had the earth been divided into equal portions among all its inhabitants.” The invisible hand is the force of democratization that counters vertical hierarchy and the disproportionate hoarding of resources, goods—and, later, capital—by setting them into a circulation salutary to the entire body politic, favoring equally beggars and kings. Just as in The Wealth of Nations, where the invisible hand will make another cameo appearance in which the integrant of capitalist society is described as being “led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention” (4.2.9) and yet which accomplishes the greatest social good, in Theory of Moral Sentiments this process of the democratic satisfaction of needs happens “without intending it, without knowing it,” as though by force of an unthinking autonomic process. And it is this process that “advance[s] the interest of the society, and afford[s] means to the multiplication of the species.” Within Smith’s discourse, asymmetries of wealth are local and incidental; the most important figure, ultimately, is that of the human collective—the single soma of boundless parts—in which such asymmetries disappear, drowned out by the wash of democratizing uniformity that humanity, on a scale so large as to be one with nature, imposes organically upon itself through the visceral logic of the invisible hand, which mindlessly, through somatic wisdom, achieves a perfect distribution of resources throughout the greater human body.

Rather than being governed—impeded, restricted, constrained, regulated—by a thinking head, the free market is intrinsically governed, in Smith’s now canonical metaphor, by an invisible hand. The invisible hand assumes the responsibilities of a higher transcendent power of organization, but puts an end to the discrete and external verticality of that power by internalizing it. The rational head is entirely excised through its functional cannibalization by Smith’s epistemically affective invisible hand. Reason and rational order are submitted to affective expression. If the invisible hand represents a manifestation of divinity, it is a divinity that is relocated downward into the soma, a force of methodical organization and balance that is thoroughly disintellected, a self-rule of the soma by the soma.

The Quakers had developed just such a model of spiritual religiosity, yet persisted in the belief in an exogenous godhead as the source of the inner light. Smith’s invisible hand does away with all exogeny, granting the soma a status of pure immanence. When liberated from all regulatory and executive administrative obstacles, capital will naturally flow, as though guided by this disintellected invisible hand freed from the constraints of an authoritative thinking head, in a pattern that will maximize its potential for accumulation and profit. Unfettered capital will circulate like blood through the body politic—now conceptually homologous with the market—carrying economic oxygen to and fro according to organic demands for its movement. The disintellected hand represents an autonomic, rather than rational, orchestration of this movement, a movement that will always tend toward the well-being of the market-public as a whole. The somatic regulation of the invisible hand represents a homeostatic model in which unrestricted capital flow maximizes good social health.

Shortly after the birth of liberal democracy and the invisible hand, France followed suit with a bourgeois revolution of radically egalitarian ideology that literally severed the heads of its monarchy. If we view this will to decapitate as a rejection of transcendent vertical dualism in favor of immanent somatic monism, then we will find in contemporary philosophical discourse the European analog of the American universalization of emotion that Eustace lays out as the foundation of bourgeois revolution. In 1739 David Hume claimed in A Treatise of Human Nature, “Reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any office other than to serve and obey them” (2.3.3.4, 266). Half a century later—in synchronicity with the French Revolution—we find this inversion of Cartesian dualism to be even more emphatically articulated in Jeremy Bentham’s Principles of Morals and Legislation, which, from its opening lines, locates sovereignty in affect, dressing the feeling soma triumphantly in the language of the repudiated thinking head:

Nature has placed mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain and pleasure. It is for them alone to point out what we ought to do, as well as to determine what we shall do. On the one hand the standard of right and wrong, on the other the chain of causes and effects, are fastened to their throne. They govern us in all we do, in all we say, in all we think: every effort we can make to throw off their subjection, will serve but to demonstrate and confirm it. In words a man may pretend to abjure their empire: but in reality he will remain subject to it all the while. The principle of utility recognises this subjection, and assumes it for the foundation of that system, the object of which is to rear the fabric of felicity by the hands of reason and of law.

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The ratio of pleasure to pain is what indicates the political action optimal to the maintenance of homeostasis in the body politic, a homeostatic equilibrium defined in affective terms as “felicity” (in a note to the second edition of 1823, Bentham observes that the term “principle of utility” has come to be known equally as the “principle of happiness” [1n1]). Indeed, it is the capacity of the body to move autonomically toward maximal well-being that becomes the guiding conceptual principle for political life. The body’s affects have become the new social monarch, ruling headlessly from within. Reason is here no longer glorified as an epistemic ontology—that is, as a viable terrain for the acquisition of knowledge and order—but rather as a secondary posture of recognition of the a priori dominion of the affects over all aspects of human affairs. The strategic management of this primordially affective condition is the purview of reason, but the human condition itself—and its social and civic life—is affirmed as being foundationally affective. Once more, the ruling head is relocated downward to the soma, where it is recast as internal affective process: a contest between pain and pleasure in which a pleasurable equilibrium is the model for the optimal social ideal.

Capitalism—as Weber argues—may well be said to have harbored reason as a dominant organizational paradigm for the following two centuries; for evidence of this rationalization, one need only think of the Fordist assembly line and its Taylorist refinement in the optimization of physical movement or the contemporary calculation of industrial productivity to the ten thousandths of a second.⁹ Yet we should remember that its originary—revolutionary—self-legitimizing discourse was one rooted in the primacy of the passions and the resultant vision of a social compact based on the moral balance of homeostatic health and well-being. Since its inception, capitalism has been culturally naturalized as a system whose benefits may be quantified in a calculus of the social good. Its proponents argue that capitalism brings about a prosperity that is tantamount to robust health; its detractors, making the opposite claim from within the same symbolic terrain, assess its faults in terms of social malaise or ill-being: disease, desperation, dehumanization. In the late nineteenth century Charles Dickens decries these latter ills as the product of capitalist industrialization. If we accept that Dickens, like other authors of his day, may—approaching Herbert Marcuse through Nancy Armstrong’s reading—participate in an “inward turn” that places onto “each individual [the responsibility] for finding within him- or herself emotional, spiritual, or aesthetic compensation for whatever forms of compensation he or she may lack in material terms” (Armstrong 143), then we could consider a work like Diamela Eltit’s Mano de obra (Work Hand, 2002) as a modern-day Dickensian dystopia without the compensatory inward turn. Here the concepts of “love” and “respect,” indeed, the entire interior moral landscape, have been colonized by the culture of the megasupermarket in a patently perverse utilitarian discourse of “good” that is profoundly bad. On the opposite end of the discursive spectrum, Lloyd Blankfein, current CEO of the powerful global investment bank Goldman Sachs, defends the “good” of capitalism by asserting a “social purpose” for the banking industry: the “virtuous cycle” of the creation of companies, wealth, and jobs from capital. That Goldman Sachs has maintained vertiginous holdings in spite of the current economic recession and crisis of capitalist faith should, in Blankfein’s view, make “everybody … frankly, happy” at this success story of bankers “doing God’s work” (Arlidge). (Never mind that months after Blankfein’s claim to godliness, Goldman Sachs was accused by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission of defrauding investors in the recession-provoking housing market collapse [Goldstein].)

There is a recent convergence of interest among cultural theorists around the end of the eighteenth century, precisely the moment in which Smith and Bentham are writing, in which the birth of free-market capitalism, liberal democracy, and the Industrial Revolution all come into being (in turn recasting formal empire, from this point forward, as an “imperialism of free trade,” to borrow John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson’s landmark 1953 term for neocolonialism). Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri look back to the American Constitution as the genesic model of twenty-first-century empire (in which there is neither formal empire nor formal colony, but rather all-encompassing systemic immanence—echoing the furthest-reaching implications of Gallagher and Robinson’s model of neocolonial imperialism—and also of Smith’s theoretical dispensation with crown and empire). Giorgio Agamben finds in the French revolutionary Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789) a decisive biopolitical shift in which “bare life,” heretofore “clearly distinguished as zo from political life (bios), now fully enters into the structure of the state and even becomes the earthly foundation of the state’s legitimacy and sovereignty” (127). Michel Foucault argues in The Order of Things that the end of the eighteenth century witnessed a profound epistemic shift, which he characterizes as the “transformation of structure into character … based upon a principle alien to the domain of the visible—an internal principle [that] is organic structure” (227). The end of the eighteenth century, in synthesis, witnessed the birth of a neoempire of bare organic life. A critical mass of scholarship is also growing around the eighteenth century that redefines it as a function not of its rationality, but of its sentimentality (e.g., Brooks, Dupré, Festa, Frazer, among myriad others).

Let us review in brief the multiple threads of the conceptual investiture of the late eighteenth century that we have traced herein: the invisible hand and autonomic self-regulation of the economy as the specular homologue of the entire social order (Smith); pain and pleasure as the absolute sovereigns of human, and therefore political, life (Bentham); the positioning of bare life as the foundation of political life (Agamben); the democratic constitution as the foundational principle of immanent empire (Hardt and Negri); and the notion of organicity as the operative epistemic modality (Foucault). The homeostatic principle embraces all of these ideas: a self-contained, self-regulating, organic model of immanent organization and control in which the feeling soma rules itself on moral grounds without the intellectual interference of transcendent rational authority. This is the constellation of affective positivities, to employ Foucault’s term for the key topoi of epistemic thought and discourse.

Foucault implicitly assumes that epistemes were inherently rational, yet he also muses on the difficulties of explaining what he characterizes as the “enigmatic event” of the emergence of “organic structure” within “some progress made by rationality” (The Order of Things 238). Might we not consider that what Foucault has trouble characterizing within a trajectory of rational epistemicity signals, precisely, its rupture? The point in time Foucault links to this irrevocable tear in the epistemic fabric is the same point in time that we have characterized as the age of bourgeois independence and the birth of the democratic principle, in parallel with the emergence of free-market capitalism and a new form of colonial imperialism that prefers economic neocolonialism to the formal imperial fact. Could we identify this tear in the epistemic fabric of the West as one that ushers in affect as a new epistemic principle? In other words, that affect becomes, henceforth, a competing cultural logic?

Persistence of the Rational Colonizing Head

If this epistemic rupture ushers in affect as the new vehicle for modeling knowledge and framing discourse in the era of free-market capitalism, then it is important to note that what affect-as-episteme bursts forth to interrupt and challenge is the era of first-wave colonial imperialism and its epistemic handmaid, the rational discourse of the modern West. We might view reason as the episteme of Western colonial imperialism—which would begin with late fifteenth-century Spain—with the cogito as the conceptual expression of an imperial practice that Ángel Rama describes, in an analysis of Spanish imperialism, as “a whole series of transmitted directives … from the governing head [of empire] to the physical body [of the colony]” (7). The bipartite affirmation “I think, therefore I am” creates a dichotomy between authoritative reason and subject body, with rational thought taking on a sovereign role of effectively authoring the body into being. The rational mind observes the subject body from on high, codifying, regulating, taxonomizing. The intellectual head remains the supreme locus of organizational power, ruling over the subject body that is at once exalted, as the living proof of the head’s creational genius, and abject, as necessarily inferior to its creator. Instead of characterizing the head’s activity in terms of creation, perhaps we ought to substitute the term discovery—as intentionally suggestive of the relationship between the Old and New Worlds. The thinking head—with its transcendent mind—discovers, through its thought, the fact of physical being, just as the Old World “discovered” the New and sought to organize this new terrain in its likeness, but without allowing it to progress from abject savagery to rational civilization. The New World is the future of Europe, its paradise and promised land, but, paradoxically, it must nonetheless be eternally inferior to the original model. We may conceive of Old World colonialism as formal (during the period of Spanish dominion), epistemological (following Pratt’s view of Europe’s early modern global intellectual hegemony), or informal (as per Gallagher and Robinson’s argument regarding the free-market imperialism of Britain over Latin America—along with the school of economic dependency theory). Regardless of how we characterize Old World colonialism, its living New World subjects constitute the body “discovered”—now glorified, now reviled—by this distant governing head.

And so we come full circle to our initial observation in regard to the thorough repudiation of the Cartesian subject as the administrator of Western colonialism (arguably nowhere more explicit than in Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth). But reason does not die away completely with the final twentieth-century “decapitation” of the colonial head. The colonial head, we must remember, has already long since given itself over to the management of free-market capitalism, whose practice—and companion discourse—of growth has been engaged in a lengthy process of rationalization—and, many argue, neocolonial exploitation: perfectly abstracted imperial structure, now absent of both formal empire and colony. The ideology of growth associated with rationalizing imperialist capitalism could be considered an epistemically hybrid discourse in the sense that it takes on the biological contours of affective epistemicity but adapts them to the neocolonial project of vertical rationalization.

The collapse of the Soviet Union represents the bitter end of formal, albeit quasi, colonization. The first and second worlds had openly vied to control the globe. With this collapse, as Fukuyama gave us to understand in his essay “The End of History?” and later in his book The End of History and the Last Man, free-market capitalism—alternately known as “liberal democracy”—assumed universal proportions as the “last man” standing. Affect-as-episteme has no further challenge, no further obstacle to its cultural hegemony. On balance, growth is rendered epistemologically obsolete; full expansionism has been conceptually guaranteed, and now the discourse of perfect immanence may come to the epistemological fore.

It is not only the eradication of obstacles to its diffusion that marks the global capitalism of the post-Soviet period but also the simultaneous development of a technology in the form of the World Wide Web that accomplished the realization—and reactivation—of its inherent originary potentialities.⁹ Regarding the historical convergence between the emergence of the Web and the triumph of neoliberalism, new media studies critic Lev Manovich has the following meditation:

Although causally unrelated, conceptually it makes sense that the end of [the] Cold War and the design of the Web took place at exactly the same time. The first development ended the separation of the world into parts closed off from each other, making it a single global system; the second development connected [the] world’s computers into a single network. The early Web (i.e., before it came to be dominated by big commercial portals toward the end of the 1990s) also practically implemented a radically horizontal, non-hierarchical model of human existence in which no idea, no ideology, and no value system can dominate the rest—thus providing a perfect metaphor for a new post–Cold-War sensibility.

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There may be no causal relation between the end of the cold war and the launching of the World Wide Web—or at least no single cause—but we might ask ourselves whether new media technology (the Web and its mechanisms of massive intercommunicativity) emerge in satisfaction of the dictates of capitalist needs. Manovich’s characterization of the Web as “implement[ing] a radically horizontal, non-hierarchical model of human existence in which no idea, no ideology, and no value system can dominate the rest” is a concise paraphrasis of the epistemic fundaments of capitalist homeostasis. In this sense Manovich’s identification of the Web as a “perfect metaphor for a new post–Cold War sensibility” invites the interpretation of new media technology as a vehicle to realize on a virtual plane the structure and operation of the affective monosubject—the homeostatic feeling soma. In media and cultural studies discourse, the network has emerged as a signal trope of global capital (Castells, Dyer-Witheford, Fisher, Latour) and, from the perspective of affective epistemicity, the material realization of its discursive body.

In practice, networks may assume a heterogeneity of aspects and functions—including the production of systems of control, as Alexander R. Galloway and Eugene Thacker argue in The Exploit: A Theory of Networks (2007), systems of control that facilitate what I would call colonialist expansionism in the service of capitalist elitism. Yet, as a general descriptor for the wired interconnectivity that defines our social state of affairs on an increasingly global level, the “network society,” as Manuel Castells calls it, “made of networks in all the key dimensions of social organization and social practice” (xviii), is neither more nor less than the manifest architectonic rendering of the infinitely capacious soma guided by Smith’s invisible hand—with the fact that this architecture is now virtual as well as physical only increasing the girth and expanse of the collective capitalist subject.

It is in this context that we have witnessed the explosion of affect in every field of knowledge, most strikingly within the natural sciences, which had for two centuries endured and thwarted, as the last bastion of epistemic reason, the incursions of affect. Suddenly, in the post-Soviet era, the flirtations with the scientific study of affect that had begun in the post–World War II era of U.S. economic, military, and cultural preeminence exploded in scale. Now, well into the second decade of the twenty-first century, the cutting edge of research in each of the three major disciplines is, in some way, an inquiry into affect, whether physiological or discursive, empirical or representational, material or symbolic. Contemporary culture and politics likewise reflect this discursive shift in the same measure that free-market capitalism—neoliberalism in its most contemporary iteration—has achieved unprecedented heights of both hegemony and contestation.

It may be that the development of new media network culture affords capitalism with the technological realization of its epistemologically idealized homeostatic structure, causing its discourse of growth comparatively to wane, but its practice does not cease to be what Weber called “identical with the pursuit of profit” (5). The global neoliberal variant of capitalism presents a paradox. On the one hand, the ideological and technological circumstances are such that capitalism’s epistemologically affective discourse can come to the fore virtually unchallenged, confronting the problem of conversion—from markets to epistemologies—rather than any problem of competition. On the other hand, this very condition of global hegemony allows neoliberal capitalism to take its practice of profit making to new extremes of neocolonialism, yielding a vertiginous divide between a tiny global elite and the heterogeneous masses.¹⁰ Where capitalist apologies maintain that such radical asymmetry—and the poverty and social injustice that accompany it—are accidental, David Harvey argues that they are structural—the “raison d’être” of the system as opposed to a mere “side-product” (98).

Hence neoliberal capitalism’s greatest and most persistent difficulty: the reconciliation of its practical telos of profit (growth) with its epistemic self-portrait of harmony (homeostasis). For, in theory, the sprouting of a monarchical—colonialist—“head” constitutes the most powerful allegation of immoral hypocrisy that could be leveled against capitalism in its revolutionary iteration, because it strikes at the core of the capitalist discourse of epistemic affect itself, which staunchly maintains an ethic of anti-intellectual and antivertical headlessness—the sovereign self-regulation of the body by the body.¹¹

Affective Terms of Social Critique: The Contest to Define Homeostatic Well-Being

The allegation that neoliberalism has sprouted a colonizing “head” where it claims there ought to be none frames the current struggle between hegemon and dissident as a contest for the definition of affective homeostasis. If free-market capitalism has laid claim to the homeostatic principle, maintaining a monopoly on the notion of somatic well-being, then its global-era critics have begun to take it to task on its own epistemic terms, decrying this well-being as an illusion, a mere question of smoke and mirrors behind which lies a reality of profound ill-being. In other words, the critics of capitalism traffic in the same conceptual terrain epistemically dictated by capitalism itself. That is, critics take aim at capitalism precisely at the disjuncture between its rationalizing (neocolonialist) practice and its affective (anticolonialist revolutionary) discourse, charging—in the language of affect-as-episteme itself—that its practice is one that produces an ill-being entirely at odds with its discourse of well-being. (Nike, for example, staged a so-called Human Race event in 2008 meant to epitomize global harmony and health even as it faced renewed accusations of maintaining sweatshop labor conditions across the world.) In this sense, I submit that we can comprehend neither our current discourse of political contestation nor the insistence with which mainstream capitalist discourse clings to its hegemonic position without comprehending their shared epistemically affective motor.

Ulrich Beck’s concept of “risk society” (Risk Society)—which he has since rendered in a global framework as “world risk society” (World Risk Society) and as a menace to the planet itself in “world at risk” (World at Risk)—holds that the growth of capitalist modernity is predicated on dangerous risk at the individual, social, and planetary levels. (Addiction and obesity induced by the fat-sugar-salt fast food triumvirate, manufacturing waste and run-off into local water supplies, carbon emissions, and fracking are several high-profile examples from current public discussion and debate.) In other words, the unseen axis of the pursuit of prosperity is the constant risk of adverse consequences, consequences of ill-being. These risks have come to be called externalities of production and development—that is, ill-effects that are socialized outside the formal ledger of industrial and business accountability. Annie Leonard’s online animated historiography and analysis of consumer culture, “The Story of Stuff,” denounces this unseen part of consumer culture as that which pillages and pollutes people and the environment on a linear model, as though the resources at the disposition of this capitalist machine were infinite and infinitely disposable. A published version of Leonard’s video content succinctly makes its case in the book’s subtitle: How Our Obsession with Stuff Is Trashing the Planet, Our Communities, and Our Health. A documentary film titled, simply, The Corporation diagnoses the eponymous entity as a psychopath using a checklist of symptoms defined by the World Health Organization. The film posits as an amalgamation of these symptoms the disregard for both social and planetary well-being that is exhibited in the linear capitalist exploitation of resources and flagrant indifference toward the noxious effects of this exploitation on the health of individuals, communities, and nature. The central accusation: capitalism produces deadly imbalance. Yet if neoliberal practice produces deadly imbalance, then it is an imbalance discursively cloaked in equilibrium.

Addiction is the key concept that increasingly surfaces to explain the cultural permissiveness toward this capitalist devastation and acceptance of the mitigating illusion of homeostatic well-being. Exposés of the food and drug industry, of shopping, and of gambling (whether at casinos or on the stock market) make this charge. Americans are addicted to fast food, mall culture, big cars, credit cards, and pharmaceuticals. They are obese, diabetic, diseased, indebted beyond repair, virtually buried in material goods. They are almost completely alienated from their own humanity and starved for real love, as the Pixar film WALL·E asserts in its apocalyptic vision of how consumer culture destroys planetary life and leads humans to a mechanized existence of consumption in which they are so obese they cannot walk and so enslaved to onscreen virtuality that they no longer see or touch one another. Their cerebral reward center gives the positive somatic interpretation of pleasurable gratification to the effects of even the most lethal of addictive substances, thereby disabling the homeostatic principle of balanced self-regulation that tends toward truly healthy well-being like a pendular return to center.

Mad Men, a period AMC cable television series that explores the powerful culture of Madison Avenue advertising, has turned its gaze on the unbridled and unscrupulous marketing of the 1960s as a critical originary moment in the U.S. ascent to current global hegemony. (It is important to note that within the United States and elsewhere—in Latin America, for example—the leftist revolutionary discourse of the 1960s is also turning up anew, precisely as a discursive antidote for this exploitation by capitalist consumer culture.) The pilot episode of Mad Men, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes,” introduces our protagonist, creative genius Don Draper (Jon Hamm), in the midst of an uncharacteristic crisis about to how to pitch the product of his mainstay client, Lucky Strike. The adverse circumstance is a recent publication by the surgeon general conclusively linking smoking to cancer. Draper ultimately resolves this quandary by tossing the report in the trash. Advertising is about producing comfort, security, and happiness, he concludes, not about morbidly peddling in death. Accordingly, Draper arrives at the simple slogan, “It’s toasted,” succinctly reassuring in its connotations of nature, health, and home. This portrait of homeostatic equilibrium thus perversely obscures the calculated misrepresentation of profound ill-being. Lucky Strike becomes the synecdoche for the turning of profits on certain death through the promotion of toxic addiction to a product that activates the reward center of gratification—all to the fatal detriment of the consumer. Happiness becomes purely discursive, covering up a diametrically opposed reality of ever increasing ill-being as both source and effect of capitalist success.

In an affective register, neoliberal critique decries a discrepancy between neoliberal practice and discourse in which neoliberal discourse promises a perfect equity of happiness and harmony for all, yet its neocolonial practice produces wealth—happiness and harmony—for an elite at the expense of the many that it submerges into poverty, pain, and discord. Lauren Berlant, for example, takes this disjuncture as the focal point of her analysis in Cruel Optimism, in which she argues that the cultural promise of happiness for all is belied by a contrary reality. Neoliberalism contests this critique by reasserting its claim to well-being, which has become the key trope—underwritten by epistemic affect—of social legitimacy.

Empathic Imaginaries of the Social: Altruism, Posthumanism, Sustainability, Revolution

If the act of distinguishing between ill-being and well-being has become the basis of imagining alternative social realities, then it is no wonder that empathy has surfaced as a key concept in cultural discourse, for empathy is, simply, the ability to comprehend the feelings of another. Empathy might be defined as the art of affective diagnosis—with the implication that the agent of empathic diagnosis will be led by the affective information derived from this diagnosis to adopt a behavior that will tend toward the well-being of the Other. Empathy, then, is a behavioral method of achieving social homeostasis, with a constellation of positive affects—care, compassion, love—motivating the empathic act. We might understand empathy, in other words, as a social practice of the construction of collective well-being based on love (to take love as a metonym for the positive affects motivating empathy).

In biology Frans de Waal’s ideas about morality in the primate world serve as the main text for an edited theoretical inquiry into the evolution of morality in Primates and Philosophers that de Waal expands into a social model in The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society (2009) on the strength of the central idea that altruism—and not selfishness, as was accepted for decades following Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene—is the basis of adaptive behavior. In The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among Primates (2013) de Waal argues that morality—in humans considered the purview of religion—should more accurately be understood as biologically innate and the result of evolutionary adaptation. Economist Jeremy Rifkin, likewise, postulates the concept of “empathic civilization” as the only viable remedy for the apocalyptic course set by our synthetic human-made environment. The business world, as the originary producer of this discourse, is also repositioning itself to learn from those who would hold it to the letter of its own epistemic law, as is evidenced, as just one example among many, by Dev Patnaik’s Wired to Care: How Companies Prosper When They Create Widespread Empathy.

In the same vein as de Waal, poststructuralist theory—most notably, Jacques Derrida with his “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow)”—has been evolving into a so-called posthuman modality for well over a decade. Cary Wolfe gathers these interventions together in his edited volume Zoontologies, which, in combination with his own analysis of “posthumanist theory” in Animal Rites, and his more sustained development of a theoretical model in What Is Posthumanism?, elucidates the phenomenon of theoretical interest in the animal as fundamentally rooted in the expulsion of humanity from its self-arrogated throne of ecological dominance. This kind of “decapitation” of cultural anthropocentrism mimics the logic of affect-as-episteme in that it effectively dethrones “man” from the rule of the animal kingdom—from the rule of the universe. For man as a discursive invention comes into being, according to Foucault (The Order of Things), precisely with the birth of the logic of “organic structure,” which we might consider under the alternative terminology of affect-as-episteme. And so the notion of a self-governing, homeostatic, headless—organic—structure of order replaces a vertical one in which the rational and externally imposed monarchical head governs from above. What posthuman theory decries is the way in which “man”—though apparently involved in a thoroughly democratic and horizontal relationship with “him” self—nevertheless lords over the rest of the animal world in a kind of reemergence of the monarchical head that had to be repudiated as a founding condition of “his” conceptual emergence. The posthuman position is one of affective—organic—purism in that it rejects this de facto head. In other words, what this posthuman theory proposes is, first, that the model of epistemic affect—of organicity—not be designated in homology with the human body, but rather with the entire animal kingdom, a diversity of life united, in the most basic regard as explored by posthuman theory, by emotion, and, second, that an ethics of well-being—practices of empathy—be negotiated within that entire corpus of living beings, not just among humans. This democratized vision of a horizontal web of life is epistemologically analogous to the decentralized network structure of the feeling soma—now conceptually expanded to embrace all humanity and, in even more radical conceptualizations of life, the planet itself.

Indeed, the emergent discourse of sustainability takes both altruism and posthumanism to their ultimate consequences by proposing that the homeostatic model ought to expand to include the whole of life itself at the intersection of the environmental, the social, and the economic, and that a concern for all-inclusive planetary well-being replace a concern for profit as the central motor of social life. Far beyond simply turning off lights or recycling paper, the concept of sustainability poses the most significant challenge to capitalist powers since the revolutionary discourse of the 1960s. In a 2006 speech before the United Nations General Assembly, Bolivian president Evo Morales developed a conceptual dichotomy between “living well” (vivir bien) and “living better” (vivir mejor) that sets in clear relief how sustainability may be understood in the dimension of comprehensive social contestation. In Morales’s incendiary definition, the capitalist way of life—living better—is “to pillage, to rob, to exploit”; the alternative way of life—living well—is to live in respectful harmony with Mother Earth, in peaceful community, and with collective property. For Morales, the linear excess of “living better” is as environmentally untenable as it is socially cruel and economically self-interested. The interconnectivity of nature and people in a system of balanced exchange of “living well,” on the other hand, is sustainable because it is environmentally conscientious, socially kind (empathic), and free from the imbalances of economic asymmetry.¹²

Whether in its most modest or radical variant—and understanding it as a simultaneously three-way intervention into the domains of people, planet, and profit—sustainability may well be said to constitute the new discourse of social change, on a spectrum from reform to revolution. Yet sustainability discourse maintains a relationship with capitalism that is one of epistemic solidarity rather than epistemic aggression. That is, sustainability may seek to change capitalism—from meekly “greenwashing” it to aggressively countering its neocolonial practice, but, regardless of its position along this continuum, sustainability only works to reaffirm capitalism’s affective epistemological supports insofar as it constructs itself out of the same model of universal homeostatic organicity.

The lesson here is that for the immanent “we” that has no outside, revolution may only assume the form of therapy, a movement away from ill-being and toward well-being; violence has no place in revolution by the feeling soma. Under the sway of epistemic affect, revolution becomes a practice of empathy in which the battle is over the right of the immanent “we” to well-being. This understanding of revolution as being founded on and driven by an exercise in empathy (a diagnosis of self and of the countless others in the immanent “we” as so many proximate selves) helps to explain what goes emphatically expressed but completely unglossed in Hardt and Negri’s estimation, namely, that the militant of immanent empire wages a battle that becomes a “project of love” (Empire 413). The concept of affect-as-episteme allows us to understand that this project may contest capitalist empire, but it in no way moves outside its epistemological logic.

Toward the Epistemic Recognition of Soma-as-Knower

The very visceral immediacy of affective signification that makes it so powerful is also what blinds us to its legitimacy as a vehicle for social representation. Like Žižek and Gore, on a cultural level, we still fail to recognize—and valorize as significant—the phenomenon of affectively figured social meaning that surrounds us, instead training our expectations on a rational model that has come to prove elusive time and again. If we look closely, we will see that theoreticians across the disciplines are providing us with the material to revisit and revise our consciously held conceptions regarding the epistemic foundations of self and knowledge. Rei Terada has revisited poststructuralist theory to foreground an emotional content—a “feeling in theory”—that no one had ever supposed was there; Daniel Heller-Roazen performs a sweeping survey of the philosophical canon to elucidate the heretofore unstudied references to the senses—the “inner touch,” as he calls it. Jon Protevi gives an exposition of the conceptual importance of the body in modern political philosophy. In Peninsular Hispanism, the collaborative project “Emotional Cultures in Spain from the Enlightenment to the Present” directed by Jo Labanyi (New York University), Elena Delgado (University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign), and Pura Fernández (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid), seeks to reread Spanish literary and cultural history as a function of affect. Emotion has been there all along; its status has simply experienced an epistemic shift, and scholars are, in effect, returning to the Western canon to give the presence of emotion a new epistemic interpretation. The interest in affect that is bubbling up in every discipline is a sign of the times, an indicator that a common model of knowledge—a common epistemic cultural fabric—is guiding thought on the cutting edge of every major field of investigation in a like-minded direction. We all know that we are conceptually captivated by affect; my intervention seeks to address—and take first steps to remedy—the fact that we don’t yet know why.

Until we know the whys and wherefores of this captivation, we will continue to willfully misunderstand—to second-guess and devalorize—our own interpretations of affective discourse. In spite of the ready intelligibility of affective narrative on its own terms, as cultural subjects steeped in its logic we will nevertheless continually seek to reinscribe affect within reason.¹³ We will continue to profess scandal at Mel Gibson’s overwhelmingly graphic representation of Jesus’s torture (The Passion of the Christ) instead of analyzing the dialogue of suffering and empathic facial expressions as the film’s most powerful narrative motor. We will, along with A. O. Scott, conclude that Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel is, “like that tower in the book of Genesis … a grand wreck,” because it “does not seem to be tethered to any coherent idea or narrative logic,” even though we have titled our very review “Emotion Needs No Translation” and have astutely observed that the director’s “own visual grammar tries to go deeper [than a banal lingua franca] to suggest a common idiom of emotion.”¹⁴ We will assert, like Anthony Lane, that Fernando Meirelles’s Blindness “forgets to tell a story—to keep faith with the directives of common sense” even though we give a full account and profound analysis of the film’s figuring of blindness as a social parable and moral challenge: “That is why [Meirelles] opens with traffic, choked not merely with pollutants but with the emissions of our haste and rage, and why he closes, two hours later, with the prospect of paradise regained, around a dinner table, and with a hint of sight restored. It was all our fault, and the healing is up to us.”

Taking these three films as a microcosmic yet representative sample of the kind of discourse that contemporary global cultural production is yielding, what an awareness of affect-as-episteme allows us to see about them is what they unexpectedly share, in spite of the ideological differences of their directors: namely, a strategy of politicized storytelling in which sensory experience culminates in emotional landscapes that represent moral and ethical positions.¹⁵ All three films, moreover, present corrective social models based on the transit from hurtful indifference—strongly associated in each with the capitalist status quo—to loving empathy, a condition that reconfigures the terms of social bonds along new lines no longer defined by money, status, possessions, and hierarchical power. What is essential to note is that this critical position derives foundationally from the very fabric of the discourse it seeks to contest.

In late 2010, popular political uprisings around the globe became the real-life counterparts of these cinematic texts whose analysis I suggest is unproductive if not versed in affective epistemology. The Spanish indignados and the successive so-called Arab Spring of collective protest throughout the Middle East initiated this chain reaction of imitation worldwide, challenging and even toppling governments on the strength of new-media driven resistance to regimes diverse in character but sharing the common objectionable characteristic—as articulated by the narratives of protest—of an elitism that has disenfranchised the general populace.

In September 2011 the United States bore witness to its own self-proclaimed counterpart to the Arab Spring in the form of a popular New York City–based resistance movement called “Occupy Wall Street” that has since been interchangeably represented with its Twitter tag as “#OccupyWallStreet.” The new-media propelled movement defines itself as “leaderless” and undefined by social markers (“people of many colors, genders, and political persuasions”) with the exception of the sheer force of numbers: “We Are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%,” the movement’s emphatically “unofficial” Web page reads (Occupy Wall Street). Against the “heads” of capitalist excesses, this movement posits itself as a headless soma, an immanent “we” that reasserts—in symbolically lowercase presentation—the principles of democracy as a discourse of self-legitimation: “we the people, of the united states, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice, insure domestic tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity, do ordain and establish this social movement” (We Are the 99%). Protest discourse features empathy as a guiding logic of the action and objectives of this collective: “Compassion is the gold of the new paradigm,” one protest sign reads, an image captured in a photo that is posted in an online album with the caption “Occupy Wall Street with Love” (Perez).

Cultural and political analysts have been torn between interpreting Occupy Wall Street and the Arab Spring as an interruption or a perfection of global capitalism (see, e.g., Thomas L. Friedman’s characterization of these positions as “The Great Disruption” versus “The Big Shift”). They have also been uncertain as to how to interpret these movements’ goals or political potential; a chorus of incomprehension—“What do they want?”—swept across the U.S. media in the immediate wake of Occupy Wall Street’s inception. Speaking in particular of the Spanish “15-M” movement that has broadly come to be known as one of “indignation,” Zygmunt Bauman accuses it of being “emotional” and lacking “thought” (Verdú).¹⁶ A minority voice, however, warns against an overly dismissive attitude, suggesting—in conceptual affinity with this essay—that we must learn to read the political landscape in a new light rather than discount it as incongruent with our traditional lens and expectations. Douglass Rushkoff, for example, calls Occupy Wall Street “America’s first true Internet-era movement” and notes that it does not have a “traditional narrative arc,” but is rather a “product of the decentralized networked-era culture” that is “about inclusion and groping toward consensus.” “It is not like a book,” Rushkoff concludes; “it is like the Internet.” If this is so, then the collective protests of the immanent “we” against capitalist neocolonialism are, ironically, a rekindling of capitalism’s originary epistemology of revolution.

It may—or may not—be true that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. But, even before advancing to the debate of this question in the context of global capitalism, there is an antecedent consideration that this essay seeks to address—all the more urgently given this current turn in global politics—which is that we will never fully comprehend our own attempts at either construction or deconstruction without fully comprehending the nature of our instruments. I submit that, as yet, we only partially understand capitalism’s tools and house.

We have long been familiar with the concept of capitalist growth because it is epistemically consonant with the dominant rationalist paradigm of the modern colonialism—including its neocolonial avatar—operative from the Conquest to the fall of the Soviet Union. What we do not yet know how to consciously read and critique—because it is so thoroughly naturalized within our cultural discourse and simultaneously dismissed as an inferior source of knowledge (in keeping with the self-styled superiority of epistemic reason that is only just now beginning to cede ground to affect in the intellectual sphere)—is the concept of capitalist homeostasis, that is, a model of systematicity rooted in the principle of the rule of the body by the body, in which that body has absorbed the head. This soma thus establishes a paradigm of immanence and self-governs through harmonious and automatic (nonrational) organic flow. The social actor that results from this epistemicity is a singular collective—a unified body, an organic network—of diverse and even infinite composition nevertheless constitutive of a single “we” of immanent agency (an agency that works toward the absorption of any exogenous Other or “they” because such external agency is epistemologically anathema). The dynamics of action of this immanent “we” are those of homeostatic flow that governs over the soma’s moral state by tending toward an equilibrium whose status quo is not neutrality but rather well-being. The homology to moral flow is the organically equitable networked distribution of resources and wealth. Where the latter flow of wealth and resources is in balance, there is well-being (health and happiness); where it is imbalanced, there is ill-being (disease and unhappiness).

When we comprehend homeostatic affect as an independent epistemic modality—a full-fledged mechanism for the representation of knowledge of self and world—then we will begin to understand the discursive forces already at work around us: those that seek to hold us captive with the promise of well-being and those that denounce ill-being and propose a new model of organic health. We may revisit our notions of power—particularly Foucault’s concept of biopower (The History of Sexuality, The Birth of Biopolitics)—to ask not only how the body is controlled by the modern sovereign but also how those narratives of control are written in the language of the feeling soma itself. We will be able to conceive of an affective political actor with an agenda epistemologically driven by affect, with principal concerns over collective health and well-being. We will also be able to periodize our currently fervent epistemic interest in affect within a historical continuum that runs parallel to the evolution of headless free-market capitalism. Sense, emotion, feeling: these will be recognized as ways of knowing. Organicity and flow will be denaturalized as epistemological constructs manipulated discursively to produce social meaning. Affect-as-episteme will be intelligible as a tool of social domination as well as a tool of liberational contestation. We will, at last, render cognitively visible the discursive movements of the invisible hand.