The first and most foundational seed of
Coming to Our Senses dates to an afternoon in 2004 when I saw the Bolivian director Rodrigo Bellott’s
Dependencia sexual (
Sexual Dependency, 2003) in the annual Philadelphia International Film Festival, only to realize that it was most unexpectedly related to both the McDonald’s on the street corner opposite the theater and
The Passion of the Christ, another film that I had been discussing with friends in view of the golden arches as we waited for the festival screening to begin. What intrigued me about Mel Gibson’s film was not its sudden authoring of a global Christ franchise or the scandal swirling through the media ether on the strength of reports of anti-Semitism in the director’s family, but rather the narrative strategy that Gibson had adopted of having Christ’s bleeding body do the bulk of the storytelling. Having this narrative blood on my mind as I watched
Dependencia sexual, I was struck by its somatic parallel with the strange denouement of this latter film in which five central protagonists vomit one by one as a culminating critique of the violent sexual addiction produced by global consumer culture. Nor was this blood and vomit far removed from McDonald’s first global advertising campaign, which it had recently launched, “i’m lovin’ it,” which sought to market hamburgers through smiles, laughter, and the exuberance of general well-being represented in a commercial campaign based on visual images of people having fun together against the background of audio tracks by pop stars like Justin Timberlake and Tony Santos in the English- and Spanish-speaking worlds, respectively. The rational metalanguage of old—the language of Christ’s teachings, of politically inflected cultural critique, of product promotion—had all ceded, it suddenly seemed to me, to what we might, for the sake of contrast, call an affective intralanguage: a language (or, simply, semiotics) figured in the logic of the feeling soma, understanding that logic to be immanent to the feeling soma—a knowledge produced by and for the soma, without rational intervention or transcendence.
Once I had begun to appreciate the degree to which cultural production was operating on an affective paradigm of knowledge, my interpretive lens retrained its focus accordingly, seeking out instances of emotionally coded narrative meaning in any medium—a search that became a nearly ten-year project. Over the course of a decade of gathering evidence, I also began to see how the same paradigm of affective signification was at work in critical production—that is, the emotional knowledge implicitly figured in cultural production was explicitly theorized in critical discourse.
As a prelude to the more panoramic and theoretical consideration I will give to the role of affect in cultural discourse in the introduction, I would like to pause in order to show how we might appreciate an intensification of affective discourse in critical scholarly writing over the past several decades. I will suggest a more precise periodization for this intensification in the introduction; here I would like to focus on the qualitative shift in the conceptual place afforded to affect in a close reading of a series of groundbreaking interventions in affective discourse across scholarly disciplines.
The key concepts I will present for comparative analysis are Raymond Williams’s structures of feeling (1977), Antonio Damasio’s brain science of emotion (2003, the culminating text in a trilogy begun in 1994), Kathleen Stewart’s ordinary affects (2007), and, by way of Stewart, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s bodies without organs (1972). I have selected these interventions for analysis on the strength of how authoritative and even canonical they have come to be regarded in their respective fields, but my intent is not to present them as authorities upon which my analysis seeks to rest. Rather, I seek to historicize these incursions into affective discourse—monumental incursions, with respect to their investigative fields—as illuminating a continuum along which scholarly affective discourse has developed a progressively epistemological face. In other words, I seek to give skeletal evidence of an intensification of the scholarly tendency—across disciplines—to locate innovation in the domain of the affective.
In his essay “Structures of Feeling”—arguably the section of Marxism and Literature (1977) of the most significant posterity, having become a cultural studies commonplace—British literary critic Raymond Williams theorizes the process by means of which social institutions come into being, as though to investigate the prelife of Louis Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISAs, 1970). Althusser and Williams write only a few years apart during the decade of the 1970s, but this is a time of intense and swift change in the aftermath of the repression by the recently colonyless French bourgeois state of the May 1968 student-worker strikes, on the one hand, which would seem to be Althusser’s point of reference, and, on the other, the emergent culture of neoliberalism that would seem to be that of Williams. Althusser writes of social structure as a rigid and ever present force constituted by the ISAs as “toujours déjà donnée” (“always already given”), whereas Williams, who periodizes his book simply by saying it is “written in a time of radical change” (1), conceives of these structures as much more in flux, with a life cycle of their own. As a point of departure, Williams avers that “in most description and analysis, culture and society are expressed in an habitual past tense” (128). What follows makes clear that this observation is not free of judgment: “The strongest barrier to the recognition of human cultural activity,” Williams continues, “is this immediate and regular conversion of experience into finished products” (128). Against this conversion of the social into a preterit mode, Williams posits the alternative of “a kind of feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange” (131).
This dichotomy between the “habitual past tense” and an “embryonic phase” of cultural expression calls to mind the contemporaneous characterization of Hollywood cinema by Cuban filmmaker and New Latin American Cinema ideologue Julio García Espinosa as being defined by the preterit mode; against this, he calls for “un cine imperfecto” (1967)—a cinema “imperfect” in the grammatical sense of a present tense coming into being that resists the reification of finality. For García Espinosa, the preterit is the epistemic modality of imperialist culture, the imperfect that of its revolutionary counterpart. Williams does not overtly politicize the preterit-imperfect dichotomy in the same manner; rather than casting it as a question of poles, either of which might trump the other, and each of which is associated with an opposing political system, Williams instead presents it as a Hegelian dialectic in which the process of social becoming eventually gives rise to its own perfection in the grammatical sense of having been fully realized, a completion that, the reader is left to infer, will usher in a new phase of becoming followed by its full realization, and so on.
It is significant that Williams leaves the reader to infer the cyclical nature of his model, instead lingering in the consideration of the structures of feeling. Even though Williams is presenting a dialectical model within which the so-called structures of feeling are integrated as one phase in a two-part process, his real interest, as the title of his essay conveys, lies in this phase of becoming, the inchoate stage of cultural forms “in solution” (133) as opposed to their eventual “precipitated” (134) structure. It is this structural stage of being “still in process” and, “methodologically … a cultural hypothesis” (132) that constitutes the novel aspect of Williams’s proposed dialectic, as his labor of terminological definition makes clear:
The term [structures of feeling] is difficult…. An alternative definition would be structures of experience: in one sense the better and wider word, but with the difficulty that one of its senses has that past tense which is the most important obstacle to recognition of the area of social experience which is being defined. We are talking about characteristic elements of impulse, restraint, and tone; specifically affective elements of consciousness and relationships: not feeling against thought, but thought as felt and feeling as thought: practical consciousness of a present kind, in a living and interrelating continuity.
(132)
Despite the fact that Williams is sketching out an ontology of the life cycle of social structures, there is a certain value judgment discernible in the relationship he attributes to each phase of that dialectic in which the structures of feeling occupy a position of privilege with respect to fixed forms insofar as these latter finished past-tense structures of social institutionalization are, in one instance, “barriers,” and, in another, “obstacles” to the recognition of “meanings and values as they are actually lived and felt” (132). Williams argues that structures of feeling “do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures and set effective limits on experience and on action”; “it is the reduction of the social to fixed forms that remains the basic error” impeding the productive analysis of these pressures and limits. Williams also rescues all of Marxist doctrine from this pitfall with the retrospective claim that an appreciation of structures of feeling is evident within Marx’s writing—“Marx often said this,” Williams tersely avers—the fault instead lying with “some Marxists [who] quote him, in fixed ways, before returning to fixed forms” (129). The structures of feeling are what Williams is “discovering”—in an act of “recognition” (128, 132), to use his own terminology of epistemological encounter—and validating in theoretical and ideological terms.
Structurally speaking, Williams’s self-styled groundbreaking intervention in the field of cultural analysis finds an analogue two decades later in the groundbreaking intervention made by Antonio Damasio in the field of neuroscience. In Descartes’ Error (1994)—and later in the Feeling of What Happens (1999) and Looking for Spinoza (2003)—Damasio elaborates a model of the “relation between emotion and reason” (x). “The new proposal in Descartes’ Error,” Damasio writes, “is that the reasoning system evolved as an extension of the automatic emotional system, with emotion playing diverse roles in the reasoning process” (xi–xii). Emotion, in other words, is not only connected to reason but is foundational to reason in an ascending relationship in which reason operates as a secondary process on the primary process of emotion. Emotion can stand alone, Damasio argues, giving us the ability “to act smartly”; reason, he clarifies, gives us the ability “to think smartly” (xi).
But, again, in a strong echo of Williams, it is not really this “smart reasoning system” (xi) per se—that is, as an
integrated system of smart action and thought—that interests Damasio as much as it is the “brain science of emotion” (x)
alone. In a ten-year retrospective preface to
Descartes’
Error published in 2005, Damasio describes the disciplinary terrain within which he sought to introduce his study of the brain science of emotion as one that had, throughout the twentieth century, given “the cold shoulder to emotion research” (ix). Likewise, in
Looking for Spinoza, where Damasio turns his attention to feelings as the conscious—but prerational—mapping of emotions within the brain, he explains he had had to counter the “established advice that feelings were out of the scientific picture,” “beyond the bounds of science” (4) in order to “map the geography of the feeling brain” (6). Like Williams, Damasio builds a two-part model in which feeling occupies the ground floor of human experience, with reason (the structural analogue of Williams’s rationalized social forms) occupying the higher and secondary floor of analysis carried out on the basis of that ground floor of feeling. Also like Williams, Damasio argues that the novelty of his contribution lies in its treatment of feeling, not of reason. And, again, like Williams, Damasio perceives himself to be thinking against the grain of disciplinary—indeed, epistemological—convention.
1To this pattern that I have identified in Williams and Damasio, I would like to add anthropologist Kathleen Stewart, whose book
Ordinary Affects (2007) seeks to develop a new scholarly language for the analysis of contemporary culture.
2 Stewart’s opening paragraphs establish a parallel with the feeling-reason divide centrally asserted by Williams and Damasio and the self-positioning as a groundbreaking voice for feeling in a discipline rooted in the terrain of the rational. Yet, where Damasio and Williams stop short of abandoning reason and its analogous social structures, Stewart brings to mind García Espinosa’s privileging of the imperfect over the preterit in her will to allow what she calls “ordinary affects” to take center stage over their cultural opposite, “dead effects” (1). Stewart’s evocation of Williams himself evidences this determination in the sense that she cites only his structures of feeling and their independence (“they [ordinary affects, now followed by Williams’s definition of structures of feeling] ‘do not have to await definition, classification, or rationalization before they exert palpable pressures,’” she sparely cites, obviating any contextualization of this assertion within the dialectic that he proposes). This dispensing with reason in the characterization of affect as fully autonomous marks a break with Williams and Damasio, who, in spite of patently foregrounding feeling in structures of culture and of the brain, both nevertheless maintain one foot in the territory of the rational: Williams presents his structures of feeling as inextricable from structures of definition, classification, rationalization; Damasio defends against the erroneous interpretation of his work as dispensing with reason (“I never suggested that emotion was a substitute for reason,” xi). Stewart, on the other hand, moves decidedly into the territory of affect over reason. She is “trying to create a contact zone for analysis” (5) now exclusively of the affective variety.
Stewart’s procedure is diarylike, “an experiment, not a judgment” (1), she declares—again recalling García Espinosa’s ideologically charged distinction between imperfect and preterit modes—in which she links anecdotes about contemporary cultural experience and glosses them with intermittent and minimalistic references to theorizations about neoliberal global capitalism (Gilles Deleuze—theorist of capitalist immanence—being the most insistent such reference). In contrast to Williams and Damasio, whose subjects resist historiography (Williams’s has pretensions of ahistoricity; Damasio’s is physiological), Stewart begins her book by locating her diary-study in the present moment of neoliberalism, following that periodization with the claim that this new experimental language of ordinary affects is an attempt to develop a discourse more adequate to that cultural reality than the customary language of rational analysis:
This book is set in a United States caught in a present that began some time ago. But it suggests that the terms neoliberalism, advanced capitalism, and globalization that index this emergent present, and the five or seven or ten characteristics used to summarize and define it in shorthand, do not in themselves begin to describe the situation we find ourselves in. The notion of a totalized system, of which everything is always already somehow a part, is not helpful (to say the least) in the effort to approach a weighted and reeling present. This is not to say that the forces these systems try to name are not real and literally pressing. On the contrary, I am trying to bring them into view as a scene of immanent force, rather than leave them looking like dead effects imposed on an innocent world.
(1)
Further on in her introduction, Stewart returns to the matter of fleshing out her definition of the language of ordinary affects and why “bottom-line arguments about ‘bigger’ structures and underlying causes”—coding the discursive procedure of rational synthesis in economic terms—miss the mark of the affective knowledge that her new experimental mode seeks to communicate. In the following two paragraphs, which are worth quoting at length, Stewart gives a definition that borders on the poetic of the model of thinking that she is rejecting and the model of thinking that she is embracing.
3 Note the use of metaphor that anthropomorphizes the affective model of thinking she champions, making the components of this model “habitable and animate,” in opposition to what she posits as the shortsighted and implicitly cold, and even less than humane, ambition of synthetic rational analysis:
Models of thinking that slide over the live surface of difference at work in the ordinary to bottom-line arguments about “bigger” structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogeneous and noncoherent singularities. They miss how someone’s ordinary can endure or can sag defeated; how it can shift in the face of events like a shift in the kid’s school schedule or the police at the door. How it can be carefully maintained as a prized possession, or left to rot. How it can morph into a cold, dark edge, or give way to something unexpectedly hopeful.
This book tries to slow the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique long enough to find ways of approaching the complex and uncertain objects that fascinate because they literally hit us or exert a pull on us. My effort here is not to finally “know” them—to collect them into a good enough story of what’s going on—but to fashion some form of address that is adequate to their form; to find something to say about ordinary affects by performing some of the intensity and texture that makes them habitable and animate. This means building an idiosyncratic map of connections between a series of singularities. It means pointing always outward to an ordinary world whose forms of living are now being composed and suffered, rather than seeking the closure or clarity of a book’s interiority or riding a great rush of signs to a satisfying end.
(4–5)
First and foremost, what I would like to emphasize about Stewart’s new model of thinking is that it asserts a fully independent status for affective discourse. Unlike Williams, who reserves a difference between “terms of analysis” and “terms of substance” (129), Stewart expressly seeks to “fashion some form of address that is adequate to [ordinary affects’] form.” This mimetic form of address is intentionally fenced off from the traditional register of scholarly analysis—“my effort here is not to finally ‘know’ [ordinary affects],” Stewart declares, effectively eschewing the operation and language of rational synthesis. Only a handful of chapter headings—which have to be teased from the text since Stewart rejects a traditional chapter index, presumably as part of the undesired scholarly format “seeking the closure or clarity of a book’s interiority or riding a great rush of signs to a satisfying end”—serve as vestigial markers of that traditional scholarly language: “The Politics of the Ordinary” (15–16), “Learning Affect” (40), “Games of Sense” (41–42), “The Self” (58), “The Affective Subject” (59), “Power Is a Thing of the Senses” (84), “Agencies” (86), “Beginnings” (128). These tropes of social science analysis—politics, subjectivity, agency—are in no way defined in the classical sense; the chapter content that they announce presents anecdotes, metaphors, stream-of-consciousness narration of emotional landscapes of self and others. Indeed, on the back jacket, fellow anthropologist Michael Taussig elegizes Stewart’s rendering of scholarly language in a strictly affective register: “Anything but ordinary, this book rewrites the social sciences from top to bottom through its bleak and beautiful honesty as to the human condition and the conditional nature of our language and concepts.” Taussig’s evaluation of Stewart’s work locates her attempt to create an affective language of scholarly inquiry on the same cutting-edge horizon as Williams, whose theorization of “structures of feeling” has become a touchstone for the consideration of affect, and Damasio, whose work has pioneered a now significant subfield in neuroscience dedicated to the exploration of emotion. We might understand the thirty-year passage from Williams to Damasio to Stewart as a progressive—and progressively radical—epistemological affirmation of affect as a vehicle for knowledge.
It is important to note that Stewart’s assertion of independence for affective scholarly discourse is not politically neutral. Her naturalization of Deleuze and Guattari’s terminology (e.g., her definition of the ordinary as a “shifting assemblage of practices and practical knowledges, a scene of both liveness and exhaustion, a dream of escape or of the simple life” [1] and of ordinary affects as the “varied, surging capacities to affect and to be affected that give everyday life the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergences” [1–2]) and her steady citation of their scholars (Alphonso Lingis, Brian Massumi, John Rajchman) codes her intervention as contestatory with respect to the cultural fact of capitalism that motivates this collective theoretical corpus. (Stewart in fact recognizes Deleuze and Guattari’s influence on her central conceptual definitions in a general footnote acknowledging her intellectual debt to their Anti-Oedipus [1972] and A Thousand Plateaus [1980].) In the face of capitalist immanence, which this de facto Deleuzean school most centrally posits, it is as though affect were to have emerged as the substance of its nonconformist—dissident—cultural expression.
The “bodies without organs” elaborated in
Anti-Oedipus is an abstract model of rebellion anthropomorphized as a body whose parts have seceded from the homeostatic union, the latter posited as a metaphor for—or, better yet, an epistemological figuring of—the teleology of capitalist production. Deleuze and Guattari’s “hero” of anticapitalist nonproductivity is the schizophrenic, whom they theorize as the maximum embodiment of the pleasure principle, understanding pleasure as a drive that seeks only its own fulfillment, in obeisance to no other dictates. Whereas capitalism demands the capitulation of every bodily organ, yoking each and all to the project of streamlined output in satisfaction of capitalist production plans, the schizophrenic liberates its body by taking pleasure, rather than work, as its telos. Its organs are freed from the harness of productivity; they are not forced to serve as cogs in the capitalist wheel. Using the body’s autonomic system as the conceptual raw material to represent models of political captivity and resistance, Deleuze and Guattari effectively create two different types of homeostasis: one in which all organs are working in synchronicity toward a prescribed capitalist end and another in which the body (“without” organs because they are freed from duties as such) chases its own bliss in perfect disregard for teleology of any kind except the program of self-pleasuring.
4What is privileged is this alternative homeostasis driven by pleasure and represented by the schizophrenic that declines on the organic level of physiology to participate in the discipline imposed on the body by the dictates of capitalist productivity. Although the entire conceptual system of negative critique and positive affirmation is somatic—that is, both constitute a homeostasis, whether in service of production or pleasure—Deleuze and Guattari nevertheless inscribe within that conceptual field of the somatic an antagonism between productivity and pleasure. Productivity is associated with a body held captive to a mechanistic rationalizing force and therefore conceptually estranged from that body and realigned with the reasoning mind, whereas pleasure is associated with the liberated body—within the plane of immanence, unbridled affect rules supreme. In the same way that Stewart’s new model of affective thinking is charged with emotion, and the rejected model of rational thinking incapable of such sentience, there is a strange way in which, in Deleuze and Guattari, the body obedient to capitalist logic is rendered devoid of affect, whereas the rebellious body that flouts capitalist logic is affectively charged with pleasure and desire. Pleasure and desire—the feeling body and affect per se—become connotative of dissident autonomy.
In this Deleuzean model that Stewart inherits and reproduces, although the negative side of capitalist hegemony is anthropomorphized and cast in the somatic-affective terms of a harnessing of homeostasis for the telos of productivity, it is nevertheless not critiqued as such—that is, not critiqued as a force of affect but rather of its absence. The cold, distant, transcendent, and rationalizing mind of epistemic neocolonialism is what is imputed to the negative model of the body colonized toward productivity, whereas its contestatory counterpart appropriates for itself the discourse of affect. If we think of capitalism and bourgeois revolution as having come about on the strength of the expropriation of affect as an epistemic category from its position of abjection in the schema of colonial reason, then what Deleuze and Guattari and company are staging is, in effect, the reenactment of this very act of epistemic rebellion. That is, casting capitalism as a neocolonial force and enacting a democratizing revolution—each organ perfectly horizontal with its peers, none in the service of a higher command, in which epistemic affect is expropriated from capitalism qua new colonial power. On the politically liberal side of affective revolution, there is no longer any need to “know”—terminologically casting knowledge as part of the repudiated schema of rational and vertical power—as Stewart asserts in regard to the avowed purpose of her book.
5How do we make sense of the epistemic representation of capitalism? Is it a democratic feeling soma or a colonial rationalizing mind? I argue that cultural and critical representations have long presented us with a case of epistemic fusion within which, if we are to parse them, the democratic feeling soma—born when capitalism
was revolutionary, quite literally in the era of bourgeois revolution—is the originary model, and the colonial rationalizing mind constitutes a subsequent development corresponding to capitalism’s gradual ascendance as a de facto colonizer. Yet it is also true, as “degrowth” theorist Serge Latouche asserts, that capitalism-as-colonizer’s guiding practical concept of infinite growth may be fruitfully interpreted as an intrinsically biological model. But even if we argue that colonial epistemicity is thus retrofitted in affective terms—Manifest Destiny as the somatic rendering of the Crusades, if you will—I would argue that, biological though the model may be, the notion of an organism in endless expansion was not the originary model justifying the political economics of capitalism. In a watershed study of this very relationship between emotion and bourgeois capitalist revolution, Nicole Eustace (2008) claims that the American Revolution was underwritten by a gradual but decisive shift in the discursive status of emotion: from being socially abject—associated with the uncouth masses—emotion was vindicated as a universal aspect of the human condition, a shift that allowed “passion [to become] the gale” of this inaugural liberal-democratic revolution. In this same spirit, I posit the hypothesis that homeostasis, and not growth, was the original epistemic justification of the replacement of the colonial monarchy with the democratic free-market bourgeoisie: a perfectly self-directed—and therefore democratic and horizontal—harmony of the internal parts that needed no interference from a master mind. This figure of bourgeois independence is, in other words, the soma orchestrated headlessly by its own internal invisible hand.
As I began to argue in the preface—an argument I will further develop in the introduction and that is foundational for the logic of Coming to Our Senses—I propose that we read Foucault’s “invention of man” in analogy to this figure of somatically rendered bourgeois autonomy. Foucault defines “man” in epistemic dimensions as the organic internalization of an erstwhile externally directed taxonomizing order. Whereas, however, Foucault posits that this epistemological figure of the “invention of man”—which he dates, precisely, to the Age of Revolution—constitutes yet another avatar of reason, I argue that we instead revisit the “invention of man” as the birth—in Western modernity, at least—of an epistemicity that is affective rather than rational.
The conceptual mechanics of capitalism are complex because they are both neocolonizing (growth) and democratizing (homeostasis). What happens in Deleuze and Guattari—to take their writing as representative of the discourse of capitalist contestation—is that there is an accusation of the neocolonizing aspect of capitalism (growth in the form of endless productivity) packaged as homeostatic colonization. In other words, the image of somatic homeostasis is portrayed with characteristics of vertical neocolonial growth. Homeostasis is thus emptied from the outset of its positive connotations; these positive connotations are, in turn, reattributed to its subversion in the form of bodies without organs. Bodies without organs—a schizoid homeostasis—becomes the democratizing principle. What is elided is the direct consideration of how capitalism, in its epistemic genesis, casts itself effectively as what Foucault calls the epistemic modality of “man”—as a self-contained, self-regulating, happy, and harmonious interconnectivity between all internal parts connected by the vital flow of capital as the infrastructural network that would also support, in a relationship of perfect analogy, its politics and culture.
It is thus not pleasure and desire or affect as a category that counters capitalism, but rather their specifically schizoid or “ordinary” aspect entering into battle with an antagonist—the affective subject in pursuit of happiness, we might say—that has only been partially fleshed out. Likewise, if we are to accept feelings of structure and the brain science of emotion as revolutionary by virtue of positing a “living” and affectively oriented model of the cultural and the physiological in opposition to the alleged petrification of rationally oriented intellectual and scientific discourse, then I argue we must consider the epistemic role of the capitalist-democratic complex that might inform such triumphalism. If the epistemic underpinnings of capitalist democracy validate a social protagonism structured on an ordering principle of nonrational feeling in opposition to rational thought—affective homeostasis versus rational cogitation—then it behooves us to contemplate the extent to which the epistemology of the feeling soma underwrites the very conceptualization of those cultural and scientific models by shaping our understanding—our
imagination—of what it is possible to know. It is to this exploration of the relationship between the feeling soma and cultural knowledge that I will turn in the introduction that follows.