2
Psychological: Emotional Infrastructures
It is a vast and ill-lit basement, intersected by pipes of all sizes, of various materials, in various states of deterioration, without obvious passageways and obstructed by tanks and storage containers of all sizes, each one of which, pipes and tanks alike, sporting dials and glass panels of equal variety whose registers, clocks, meters, thermometric pressure gauges, numerical scales, quadrants, warning lights, and calibrations are in constant surveillance by the innumerable historians in their white coats and checkboards, jostling one another as they jockey for a look or sneer at their neighbors. No one knows how many kinds of measurements are in play here, nor even the antiquity of some of the devices, each of which registers the variable rates of different indicators, such as water pressure, temperature, instability, consumption, luxury goods, life expectancy, annual film production, salinity, ideology, average weight, average heat, church attendance, guns per family, and the rate of extinction of species. Those who have concluded that these tasks are meaningless sit against the wall in various states of fatigue, others race frantically back and forth to invent a master statistic that might encompass all these random findings, while still others concentrate stubbornly on their own calculations and substitute their own algorithms which may or may not have any relationship to those of their neighbors.
None of them registers History directly, of course; it exists somewhere outside this basement or laboratory, and all the dials seem to record it in one way or another. You could certainly call it an absent cause (or an untotalizable totality) if you think it exists; but no one has ever seen anything but the gauges and their needles, the numbers and their rise and fall, which vary wildly and require separate monitors. Despite this, there persist the occasional joint cooperative efforts along with the most unsubstantiated generalizations and a tacit conviction if not a mutual agreement that there must be something or other out there.
In one of the smaller batch of instruments, something like the history of emotions is tirelessly grinding out its data and its findings, which its tenders consign to a variety of logbooks. This is a rather recent branch of activity, whose equally recent specialists have not yet united around the nature of their object of study.1 Should one write the evidence up in the form of a history of ideas, such as the idea of love or the idea of emulation? Or is the material so culturally unique as to demand an indigenous term in its own right: or perhaps even a single category is inappropriate, insofar as “emotions” include things as different as pallor, moods, trembling, red faces, and manic depression?
By now, however, most seem to settle on words and names as a convenient starting point; so we will call them named emotions, just to be on the safe side. That way, we can begin with lists; and the lists show that some of these “emotions” have become extinct, and perhaps, like the blank spots in the table of the elements, others have not yet come into being. Do these lists form systems of some kind? It is tempting to think, as Aristotle seems to, that they are organized (mostly) in pairs of opposites; for systems begin with opposites and oppositions, while the latter, the names of the opposites, if suitably personified, could be expected to act out narratives of struggle or harmony, compromise or impotent rage—narratives at once allegorical in their very structure and thereby arriving at our topic directly without beating around the bush.
In any case the identification of an emotion with its name immediately raises a far less direct historical issue, namely that of hermeneutics. How do we know that the emotion Homer attributed to this or that hero or heroine (and which has dutifully been translated into its alleged equivalent in English) is anything like what we feel today? Or to take it from another angle, how do we know that the emotion referred to in some tribal language has any equivalent in our (American? modern? Western or Eastern?) psyche, except by asking in either one of our languages? But this could go very far indeed: it could raise serious doubts about my own immediate neighbor, while leaving me in complete confusion when confronted by those delightful structuralist hobbyhorses which are the color scheme or the wine-tasting kit. It would not be very practical if emotion led us directly on into solipsism. But perhaps it is the very process of nomination itself that demands a closer look.
Meanwhile, for good or ill let us sort these terms out: those by which we name emotions seem to circulate on a different level than those reserved for judgment on them. The emotions or feelings would seem to stream along in an indiscriminate succession in which, like flowing water, they sometimes froth and sometimes stagnate, they overflow but also sink into the ground and dry up. One could imagine a sentient being whose life was nothing but a sequence in which bursts of anger punctuate fears and joys, shames and envies. Still, some of these will no doubt feel better than others, and here then glimmers the first inkling of what is not itself an emotion and what may well be called a judgment: the eudaemonic. And so, beyond the emotions and yet inseparable from them, there circulates a level on which things are not only judged to be good or bad but also pleasant or painful: are those judgments the same? They swell themselves out on the one hand into the very personifications of Good and Evil, while on the other side they get sorted out into body and mind, matter and spirit, meat and mental, material and spiritual, etc.: repression here beginning to play its part as training and habit, and shifting its identifications crosswise such that pleasure itself can become evil, while pain becomes a virtue and slowly some third position—apatheia—begins to swim into view. These are at any rate supplementary oppositions, which place the named emotions in specific and variable historical positions (for example, anger dividing into righteous and sinful kinds at one interesting moment of Western religious history). But these supplementary evaluations cannot simply be added in like a new ingredient; they must reorganize the named emotions themselves into new patterns and new oppositions.
Two distinct processes seem to be identifiable here: on the one hand, the nameless feeling is reified into the name for an emotion-event that repeats itself and that we recognize; on the other the names themselves are organized into systems of binary oppositions, which lend them that social meaning which Aristotle (for example) mapped out for his culture or mode of production. (We will examine his version more closely in a moment.) These systems of evaluation—cultural and historical—project a psychology, an ethics, and in many instances a set of religious estimations. But they are generally overdetermined by that more primitive opposition that classifies them as material or spiritual and that in some historical situations gives rise to a dual classification scheme in which the mental or spiritual “emotion” is doubled by a parallel corporeal version, which is not always the simple expression of the former but sometimes (as in Hobbes or the James–Lange theory) its reality. This is then a peculiarly complex situation in which the good–bad axis is over-determined by a material–spiritual one.
Allegory can therefore be timely in two distinct moments: first, a situation of reification in which a name is conferred on a hitherto inchoate and unidentified feeling; and a second process in which a set of already named emotions is itself reorganized by one or more sets of evaluations—eudaemonic, ethical, religious, philosophical, or sociopolitical. But its forms and its X-ray work will not necessarily be visible in historical moments or historical societies in which these systems are as functional as common sense, habitual, needing no supplementary reinforcement. The two operations, however, mark a significant dividing line between the practice of allegory as a genre or fixed form and that of allegoresis as a mode of interpretation; about which I will argue here that these constitute a single story and not two unrelated historical episodes. The greatest and most distinctive works conventionally described as allegories, however—Dante, Spenser, and Goethe—are to be grasped from both perspectives, transcending genre on the one hand and proposing a unique practice of reading on the other.
But the essential dividing line between the two kinds of allegorical phenomena has its philosophical meaning as well: for the passage marks a vaster and far more extensive sea change from substance-oriented thinking and categories to that modern perspective often known as process, the passage from Aristotle to Hegel, if you like, or from realism to rationalism (to use Gaston Bachelard’s formula): from a thinking in terms of object and what Hegel called “fixed” ideas to one of relationship and relativity, of situational concepts. Aristotle was a botanist and a biologist whose interest lay in an inventory of forms and types of objects: his fundamental category—the substance—still organizes the syntax of common sense and phenomenological experience to this day, and one can readily recognize it in those allegorical characters who wear their labels on their backs as they perform their interactions. What follows the reign of substantive thought is far less clear to anyone—post–Euclidean geometries, the dialectic, quantum physics, nonfigurative painting? But what is clear by now is that the initial interpretation of this epochal transformation as a prototypically modern “discovery” of self-consciousness or reflexivity, a radical move of thought from the objective to Cartesian and idealistic subjectivity, was incorrect, inasmuch as both objectivity and subjectivity itself are thoroughly disorganized by the antisubstantive transformation.
Indeed, did not Nietzsche observe that we would not get rid of the old substantivist metaphysics (including God himself) until we came to terms with the old grammatical first person and its “self”? Yet the “self” is another one of these allegorical objects that the analysis of allegory is likely to transform beyond recognition, an advance which will not be possible until we begin to think of the “self” as a construct and to acknowledge the allegorical nature of what may henceforth be called the construction of subjectivity as such.
This is no doubt a misnomer to the degree to which subjectivity (along with that elusive thing, the “self”) includes consciousness; and consciousness is assuredly neither a thing nor can it be “constructed”: here, as elsewhere, I follow Sartre’s account of the latter as a not-being whose existence and operations are best characterized by Husserl’s notion of intentionality, that is, as a being always “defined” by what it is not: consciousness is always consciousness of something.2 This account leads me to adhere to Colin McGinn’s extreme skepticism and to agree that consciousness can never be conceptualized: we are always within it, like fish in water, and from the inside it has no opposite.3 We represent it to be sure, but in the most impoverished way, as a point or dot of light, etc.
The self, on the other hand, seems to be a kind of thing or being, and as such can be conceptualized (and has been) as well as abundantly represented, nowhere more suggestively than on Proust’s opening page, in which a familiar self, my private property of the day, is characterized as a kind of room whose objects, in their familiar places, remind me who I am and allow me to grasp my own “identity” as a kind of habit. But since that self always has a past, the contents of this room and its very shape and location shift bewilderingly around me as I wake up to the present, racing to take their now familiar stations like the objects in a Disney cartoon, who fall into place when I am fully “there” as though they had never moved at all in the course of a long and “unconscious” night.
To be sure, one can imagine variations on Proust’s powerful representation, which depends on our life in dwellings and rooms: the desert, for example, or a dense forest through which a bewildered nomadic or schizophrenic self moves and wanders. But constructed subjectivity means that even Proust’s more stable room has been laboriously, historically, furnished; its various items deliberately purchased if not found at random in flea markets; its space as furrowed as the path I follow to my favorite armchair, the light toward which I bend my head, or the blankets that warm me on a chilly evening. All of these items are so many names; and many of them are familiar emotions—the annoyance I feel when something doesn’t fit or the pleasant anticipation with which I approach my window. “Knowing myself” in that sense means taking the familiar inventory of my reactions, the stations of my anger, the practiced caution with which I avoid unpleasant or painful thoughts, the Proustian reminder of my shopping list of loves and hates.
The self is thus an allegorical structure in its own right, peopled by names and emotions, which mainly sort themselves out into “named emotions.” To be sure, it can be approached by other representational directions; but this allegorical one is perhaps the most travelled, and in any case one of the closest to me, its general form shared by my cultural contemporaries. So it becomes easier to understand why, at certain crucial turnings, allegory should propose itself as the most useful instrument of representation and the one most propitious to this or that pedagogy of change proposed by history itself: changing the furniture, tearing down a wall, reorganizing our daily life, and perhaps from time to time admitting a new feeling or two, a new name.
Nomination is a process for which the terms alienation and reification need to be invoked, although perhaps not this soon. Yet I will argue in what follows that an emotion can only be felt as such (“qua emotion”) when it has been named: the opposite, perhaps, of the notorious James–Lange theory of emotion in which the experience is simply at one with its physiological expression. But the name is not the mind, not the spirit, not even cognitive: it is a reification by which inchoate “experience”—and even this way of putting it overlooks the fact that “experience” is after all itself just such a name and already does similar things to what it names in advance of their specific or specialized nomenclature—separated off from the stream of existence, lent specific qualities and attributes, made into a separate and individualized object of some kind. Schopenhauer expressed a profound insight when he observed that Kant’s categories were lacking in the essential: a category of the object or thing as such.4 But he failed to add that such a category is itself dependent in advance of the power of the name (or noun: the two words are significantly the same in French). Indeed, in Lacanian psychoanalysis the infant’s name is one of the primal forms of alienation, which lifts the subject into the Symbolic Order, leaving its reality as “the subject of desire” behind it in what Freud would still have called the Unconscious. My name is how other people see me, and I spend incalculable energies in attempting to coincide with it and to knowing (impossibly) what they mean by it.
With nomination, we touch on a seam between mind and body that is less obvious, and more productive, than the traditional oppositions of matter and spirit (or life, or consciousness), and also, perhaps, a little more available to tangible analysis. This focus allows us to skirt the opposition of the inner and the outer more successfully (without resolving its dilemmas altogether), and it also helps avoid the irritating paradoxes which a constructivist approach always seems to exacerbate. The structuralists were fond of the phenomenon of color as it was modified historically and according to different cultures: for color offered the twin advantages of foregrounding its linguistic medium (language and its available vocabularies can testify as to the absence in a given language of this or that modern term, or the presence of adjectives unknown to us); and of systematicity, insofar as colors are always defined in systemic pairings and distinctions from one another.5 (Wine tasting and its specialized vocabulary might have offered an analogous field of examination, except that its experiences are more reliant on testimony and more resistant to external testing procedures.) In the case of these systems, the old problem of subjectivity is never fully eliminated: does the other really have the same experience in his head, her head, that I do, and in any case what does “the same” really mean? Still, it is hard to devise satisfactory tests for the long dead, such as the ancient Greeks, or for tribes absolutely untouched by Western contact and contamination; and so otherness retreats into an even more inaccessible corner.
Such are the problems exacerbated by the analogous problem of emotions and their names; and Wittgenstein’s denunciation of the pseudoproblem of private languages is of little help here. I believe that the notion of the construction of subjectivity is for the moment—although no doubt untestable and unfalsifiable—the most productive way of thinking about this problem, for it can include notions of habit as well as the various candidates for an “idea” of the self; it can subsume psychoanalysis (where in any case with both Freud and Lacan it was to all intents and purposes practiced avant la lettre, although with the omission of the key notion of “character” and character traits); it excludes the philosophically unresolvable matter of the nature of consciousness, which it simply presupposes; and it can lend itself to the most varied and suggestive thought experiments.
Such a working conception of the production of subjectivity will need to deal with (or name) several different kinds of procedure—differentiation and alienation; familiarity and omission or repression; association; taboo or reinforcement; and finally attention, that moment of what the rhetoricians called amplificatio—which we will find to be at the very heart of allegory as such.
But at its beginning, the name. Proust gives us an experimental situation, in his description of an awakening in which the surrounding object world of the self or room pass through multiple stages and embryonic positions until they reach that of the narrator’s age and present location. So also with the inchoate, that illicit beginning of the beginning, the before of the very before itself, which as Kant taught us cannot be conceptualized, but which Hegel then taught us to posit as retroactively unconceptualizable. The word inchoate is itself already an illicit representation (it assumes a matter to be given form); and the dilemma governs both the emergence of individual consciousness and that invention of language at the “beginning” of human history.
But once we set foot in this moving stream which the very existence of language presupposes, a phenomenon becomes visible which we can speculatively theorize; and that is what we have been calling nomination or the naming of a thing: the latter thereby becoming distinguished from others (differentiation) and acquiring that identity of its own which the possession of a name presumably guarantees. But names—whether static nouns or dynamic verbs—inevitably bring a kind of repression with them: not merely the exclusion of any alternate way of framing the situation which other kinds of names might have provided, but also that distance between the name and the thing which we have observed Lacan to posit between the “subject” recognized by other people and taking his or her place in the Symbolic Order, and the “subject of desire” that sinks into what Freud called the unconscious (not to speak of the Real itself, or das Ding).6 For emotions, then, we might also think of what Proust called the “intermittencies of the heart,” in which the name comes loose from the experience it is supposed to identify, and we do not grieve “enough” (as Sartre will put it later on), the emotion-word fails to designate a plenitude of feeling, or else, as with Count Mosca’s premonition of the word “love,” it changes everything.7
Meanwhile the word for grief or love breeds familiarity and habit: the identity of the room’s furniture, the names of its contents, gradually convince us that there is such a thing as personal identity, that we have a “self,” which, thereby named, tends to do certain kinds of things and avoid some, while not even conceiving that there exist other selves whose possibilities we do not even suspect.
But there is a counterpart to this effect of habit (a pseudoconcept if there ever was one) and to the associations it seems to reinforce. Clues to this countermovement occasionally appear symptomatically in theories of the emotions where we would not expect to find them: such is for example, St. Augustine’s positing of a concupiscence of the eye as a kind of passion in its own right.8 We may call it voyeurism today, or stress the idiosyncrasy of the impulse in Augustine’s own life (or even, as with Sartre and Lacan,9 posit a drive to sight itself as a specific property of human lived experience); but it is surely surprising to come upon it in any conventional inventory of these inward “turbulences” Cicero called emotions. Meanwhile, “surprise” itself makes its appearance as a kind of emotion in Descartes’s theory of the passions, where its very name—admiration—also powerfully underscores (by way of its etymology) the sense of sight as it seems to interrupt our normal thought processes and to focus our attention on an unexpected new center of attention (whether subjective or objective). Indeed, modern psychology calls this attention as such, without explaining it any better; and we may affirm in our present context that such a moment, by separating an object from its background and “foregrounding” it in a mesmerizing way, causing us to linger over it and to prolong its identity through passing moments of time—that such a moment very precisely constitutes that amplification or amplificatio, that heightening and differentiation, dishabituation and endowment with new value, that we will henceforth begin to associate with allegory.
This is the other face of nominalism: a process which as a cultural tendency Adorno systematically denounced as the contamination spread everywhere through capitalist modernity by empiricist “thinking”: the taboo on the negative, the gradual retreat from the conquests of abstraction, the ever more peremptory insistence on the fact and the positivity of existence and reality alike and one which settles on measurability as a useful substitute for anything resembling the dialectic. Adorno’s version of nominalism has the social and political advantage of excluding critique from those positivities, insofar as critique and the negative necessarily posit what is not there, what of the past or of the future may serve as the basis for a judgment on the status quo.
But perhaps Adorno overlooked a kind of dialectical pathology of nominalism, if not in some unexpected way a paradoxical cure for it, namely the intentness with which a fact may be obsessively received, until it becomes as it were a former fact, an item floating in the void and devoid of all context or ground—a thing whose very name, if it carries it with it, is transformed into that meaningless sonority only interminable repetition can bring about. The result is then that dissolution of isotopie,10 which the analysts of traditional allegories underscored when they observed the profound breaks in realist continuity (and reading mode) caused, for example, by the appearance of Milton’s Sin and Death or Dante’s three ravenous beasts. Modernisms of all kinds have thrived on these “defamiliarizations” and breaks in niveau and reference; but allegory is not modernist in that sense (and modern allegory has a different dynamic, that of analogies between systems rather than the isolation of the individual object). And yet the phenomenon also can be construed as a kind of halt, or emergency brake, in the face of a colonization by nominalism of which realism can be a replication fully as much as a diagnostic. (A nominalist program that seeks to discredit these abstractions, which are the various systems of the named emotions, is what is referred to today as affect, a philosophical topic I return to below.)
As for the systems themselves, they come in the form of lists—generally of the basic or primary passions or emotions—which some theorists are capable of working up into a variety of “combinations,” often on the basis of classificatory oppositions. (Hobbes, for example, produces a permutation scheme on the basis of the combination of a past–future axis with a motion axis, approaching–withdrawing.) The lists with which secondary and even some primary sources confront us are problematic to the degree to which what looks like a synchronic system can also be in part a diachronic one, that is, one in which the sequence itself projects an evolution of one emotion or passion into another one: so that the problem of comparing such inventories on the basis of what they select and omit is complicated by a dynamic inquiry into the type of feeling change or psychological mechanism their sequences presuppose. The first problem will direct our attention to the personification of the various emotions, the second to what we may call process allegories, such as those deployed in Christian psychology around sin and temptation, or the therapy of salvation.
Perhaps some first step may be taken by the comparison of Western and non-Western classification schemes. The following table lists the classical Chinese view of emotions, as determined by the vital force (breath) of qi11 ; then the classical Hindu system of the rasas or “flavors” (Bharata)12 ; and finally the sequence laid out by Aristotle in Book II of the Rhetoric:
CHINA |
INDIA |
GREECE |
Joy |
Love (attractiveness) |
Anger |
Anger |
Laughter |
Friendship/Hatred |
Anxiety |
Fury |
Fear |
Pensiveness |
Compassion |
Shame |
Grief |
Disgust |
Kindness |
Fear |
Horror |
Pity/Indignation |
Fright |
the Heroic |
Envy |
|
|
Emulation |
The absence of joy or grief from the Aristotelian system has been much discussed (along with that of disgust or horror); the Chinese “pensiveness” is an unusual and idiosyncratic state by comparison with the other two schemes, while laughter (in the system of the rasas) is a welcome and humane addition to the collection (although its accompaniment by “heroic” attitudes may surprise somewhat, introducing a form of action into a generally passive-receptive series). These distinctions (Ute Frevert’s “lost” and “found” emotions)13 are of anecdotal cultural interest; and the English translations of the indigenous terms in question are obviously subject to the most strenuous etymological debate, which is more than likely to terminate in the conclusion that no English equivalents for any of the terminologies of the three foreign languages exist.
What is more important in our present context is the fact that all three lists are mediated by a specific practical focus: indeed, even with the later passage of the philosophy or the emotions to the more purely physiological, it will ultimately be concluded that there exist no immediate descriptions of emotional phenomenology. The “phenomena” are in fact embodied names, whose realities always find themselves transmitted through this or that secondary code. Thus, the Chinese table of the emotions (or passions—the very alternation of these terms is a whole philosophical choice in and of itself) is an essentially medical enumeration. Indeed, it is incalculable to what degree the medical—most often in the guise of something like the theory of the four humors14—still subtends ostensibly nonmedical classification schemes. It would seem that the Indian classification also has its sources in medical lore and practice; but in the form of the rasas (or flavors) it is an essentially aesthetic scheme, which aims at classifying the aesthetic effects of various kinds of artistic performances, from dance to theater, from music to visual representations. As for Aristotle, as the very title of his treatise indicates, his is also a primarily practical handbook, destined for orators and designed to enumerate the kinds of rhetorical effects with which speakers have to deal and which they must learn to manipulate. Postponing any consideration of the Christian version of these psychic realities, we may then quickly summarize their modern forms, from the energy models of the seventeenth century onward, as so many physiological equivalents of the older passions, if not (as in Hobbes and in a different way, with William James) so many attempts to subsume the phenomenology of emotion under purely corporeal descriptions.
The seventeenth century broached the problem by positing a parallel between the two realms of thought and feeling (or thought and extension), by connecting them (as in Descartes) via the pineal gland; or by conferring on God the obligation to hold them together at every instant (as in Malebranche’s “occasionalism”); by stoutly affirming the parallelism of the attributes (as in Spinoza); or by making a first heroic effort to subsume conscious experience altogether under the physiological movements and circulations of the material body (as in Hobbes, whose attempt simply reinforces the parallelism he wishes to abolish).
In the nineteenth century, however, Darwin effectuated a revolution no less significant than his theory of natural selection with his reduction of emotion to expression, achieved by way of that most ambiguous new technology provided by photography. The technological image now determines something like a return to older aesthetic systems such as the rasas, in this case by allowing culture to masquerade under the guise of a kind of materialist scientificity. (It is indeed this scandal of photography as such—the ambivalence between body and mind, the material image and its expressive meaning—which is responsible for the antinomies on which all “theories” of photography have come to grief.) But we might equally well blame Descartes (the first materialist philosopher as well as the first idealist one) for this slippage, inasmuch as his twin realms encourage that simulacrum of materialism indulged by Hobbes along with the idealism developed by the religious tradition. Such parallelisms can indeed be characterized as allegorical avant la lettre. As for Darwin, however, his “expressive” materialism celebrates its truly allegorical revels in the acting of nineteenth-century opera and in silent film, in which melodramatic gesticulation and facial contortion—particularly after Griffiths’s invention of the close-up—produce personifications no less “spiritual” (or semiotic) for all their corporeal pretensions. The Darwinian table of emotions (codified by Paul Ekman)15 reproduces many of the traditional items:
Happiness
Sadness
Fear
Anger
Surprise
Disgust
Yet now, in a kind of phrenological reversal,16 the physical expression encourages a belief in the autonomy of the physiological; and we confront the James–Lange theory and its reanimation in contemporary neuroscience, which reproduces all the older categories and assigns them to various parts of the brain, at the same time that it revives the older dualism of the concupiscent versus the irascible in the form of the cognitive versus the physiological. But by that time the formal link between emotion and personification had long since been broken off.
Indeed, what it is important to retain about modern theories of the emotions or passions since Descartes is the appearance of a new element, namely desire, which had not appeared in the abstract before, despite its palpable embodiments in drives like gluttony and sexuality. In the context of this discussion, we may hazard the hypothesis that it is the very concept of desire in the abstract which spells the end of allegorical personification and encourages the development of wholly new (and modern) kinds of metaphysics and conceptions of “human nature” (as well as of new kinds of allegorical structures).
But we have so far omitted the most momentous episode in the history of (Western) emotion, namely the Christian transformation of the classical emotional repertoire into the Seven Deadly Sins.17 It is time to repair this omission, toward which Evagrius’s initial list will make a beginning:
Gluttony
Fornication
Avarice
Distress (“lupe” or aegritudo)
Anger
Acedia
Vainglory
Pride
These initial eight will be reduced to the classical seven by Gregory the Great, who translated lupe into envy and combined vainglory and pride into a single psychic condition, moving it to the very top of the list of sins as such: not, however, before Evagrius had made his point. His foregrounding of the two great physical drives stands as a stinging rebuke to the pagans, none of whom would have considered either anything like a passion. We said before that what seemed peculiarly invisible in the pagan repertory, and thus decisively modern, was Desire. But here is the first form of desire, in its twin corporeal manifestations (with its more mediated form, greed, close on their heels).
It will be observed, quite correctly, that the theorization of the sins was inflected by its practical purpose, to serve as a guide for the anchoretic community which came into being after the gradual (and ultimately permanent) withdrawal of the present into the longest durée of all, the expectation of the Last Judgment. Meanwhile overdetermination must be invoked here; and the perpetuation of ecclesiastic property secured by priestly celibacy and the ban on the remarriage of Christian widows certainly play a role in early Christian asceticism; as does, in some broader view, the requirement that every new religion sharply distinguish itself in one decisively practical and stylistic way or another from its predecessors (monotheism, the ban on graven images, and so on). St. Paul’s own personal obsessions are significant only insofar as they struck the right chord in this process of universalization and institutionalization. But modern scholars—the oddly mismatched team of Michel Foucault and Martha Nussbaum in particular—have also stressed the disciplinary functions of pagan philosophy, its emphasis on moderation and on self-control. I doubt whether consumer society today will find such recommendations timely or persuasive, except insofar as they are read into the more collective conservative agenda organized around the budgetary “virtue” of Austerity. But all this is to continue to read the historical and cultural conceptions of emotion in a narrowly moralizing framework, based on the life experience of the individual (for which they purport to offer rules of conduct). Whether we have to do here with the benefits of restraint, with the salvation of the soul, or with modern therapy, all such individualizing frameworks make for bad allegory and can be decisively put in their proper place by a juxtaposition with the great (political or collective) ethics of a Machiavelli, a Gracián, or a La Rochefoucauld.
In any case, I here propose a very different framework, which has to do with the construction of subjectivity and its eventual relationship to population and the Other (to which I return later). To grasp that framework more tangibly, we must now introduce the binary oppositions that play across the various tables of the named emotions and which unify them and secure their functionality. Such oppositions, which most often serve to sort the emotions out into the recommended and the taboo, are thematically numerous and not always even consistent with one another. But we can surely make at least one acceptable and pragmatic beginning with that between pleasure and pain, from which, in tortuous and devious ways, body and mind (or soul) on the one hand, and good and evil on the other, would both seem to derive. All three can be abstracted into the more purely formal classification of positive and negative; but as for content, only such notions as simple and compound, or the Stoic idea of a pre-emotion as opposed to the named emotion proper, are helpful in reconciling overlapping systems of judgments. In the long run, however, it is by adding in temporality that these still relatively static or structuralizing schemes can be developed (and in my current language that means moving from personification to narrative).
I have already hinted at the form problem confronted by any attempt to “represent” the emotion or passion in question, with which Aristotle will wish to associate an opposite number, a positive state if this one is negative, a moderate one if it is an excess, or even a threatening negation should it (more exceptionally) have some positive merit. But this is a strategy for evading the problem rather than confronting it (as can be seen from its final Christian form, in which the vices are all conveniently and symmetrically paired with their appropriate virtues). Unfortunately, as Bloomfield has shown, the virtues are an afterthought and were added later on, some of them having to be invented out of hand for the purpose (like “calmness” for the Aristotelian pendant to “anger”). Alas, the “turbulences” do not necessarily have any opposites, despite Aristotle’s ingenuity; and it is at this point that temporality—or diachrony—comes to the rescue.
For as Bloomfield has also shown, Christian theology, whether knowingly or not, found a convenient substitute in the ancient Babylonian star journey, in which the soul moves from one distinctive position to the next: this means that classical anger (orge) cannot be neutralized by a nonexistent opposite but that it might well be redeemed by the appropriate modulation. Thus, the theologians deplored excessive, “unreasonable” fury, but were willing enough to allow that “righteous anger” (“righteous indignation”) had its uses (particularly inasmuch as God very frequently found himself having recourse to it in his dealings with his creations). Already with Augustine, I believe, the negative and the painful turned out to offer positive incentives for the sinner who grows dissatisfied with his condition. Ultimately, and armed with the relatively new conception of Purgatory (Le Goff situates its invention and adoption somewhere between 1150 and 120018), Dante was able to restore the narrativity of the Babylonian star journey on the successive shelves of his sacred mountain. It does not seem necessary to point out the obvious, namely that this narrativization of the formerly static emotions or passions makes a new and developmental if not evolutionary construction of subjectivity possible.
Still, for the modern West there persists an incorrigible temptation to return again and again to the distinction between philosophy and theology, between the Greeks and the Christians, or the secular and the sacred. One may feel that today, under current circumstances, the distinction is unhelpful and unproductive (religion being simply one more form of ideology). Or one may feel, as I do, that since Lévi-Strauss and La Pensée sauvage, we ought to be capable of including the “perceptual science” of the latter, which does not know abstraction, as well as the purely figural thinking of theology, which does not know the literal, in the house of philosophy itself (unless it seems preferable to tear the whole building down to make way for shopping malls full of Adorno’s non-negative commodified empiricisms). Indeed, does not something similar seem at work in the wholesale displacement of the named emotions by a generalized affect?
At any rate, even to understand this latest development, it may well be preferable to start again at something like a beginning, namely with Aristotle’s treatise on emotion, the Rhetoric, in order to try to determine where sin and guilt found their way into it in the first place. Heidegger called this great handbook of the emotions and how to address and use them the first great “phenomenology of everyday life.”19
It is therefore all the more striking that it should begin its inventory in the same place at which the Iliad itself began, namely with anger. Sing, goddess, the wrath of Achilles! And no doubt, of all conceivable emotions, anger is the most dangerous and antisocial, the boiling point of everything that must be contained, repressed, and disciplined for a collectivity to function. Anger is the source of all rebellions, revolutions, revolts, and even of crime; and there is a sense in which virtually all of the so-called negative emotions (Spinoza’s sad passions) find their path way back to it in one way or another. Indeed, anger is itself revealingly self-referential: appropriately enough, Prudentius’s allegorical figure of anger reaches a point in its fury at which it destroys itself.20 All historical systems of the emotions or passions have had a practical interest in theorizing anger and in finding the most manageable place for it, in determining the ways in which it can safely be diverted or used, if it cannot be extinguished.
As we have said, Aristotle’s method insists in pairing opposites in an inconsistently dialectical way: sometimes they are genuinely antagonistic terms, such as hatred and friendship; and sometimes they are simply complementary excesses that can be avoided by steering a mean between them and choosing moderation. In this sense, Glenn Most’s brilliant reading of the Iliad,21 in which Achilles’ twofold wrath (which targets Greeks and Trojans alike) is “cured” by the final experience of pity for Priam, does not square with the Aristotelian system, in which pity (if that is the right translation) does not quite work that way, and its opposite, indignation, is to be found in a different place from anger.
To be sure, the Aristotelian list presents many other anomalies for the modern reader: love, for example, does not seem to be an appropriate example of emotion for Aristotle, nor sexual desire either. Grief is altogether omitted from this system, as from ancient Greek psychology in general; while hate finds itself paired with anger in an interesting but uncharacteristic way. Anger, he tells us, is being aroused by individuals, while hatred is in contrast destined for groups, collectivities of a more general and abstract character. It will be said that as a psychology the Rhetoric is meant to offer practical instruction in public speaking and that attacks on individuals need to be staged rather differently than denunciations of whole groups or classes. Yet a good deal of purely psychological theory seeps through these suggestions, and I will draw two kinds of lessons from them at this point. The first has to do with the relationship between Aristotle’s theory of the passions and the structure of the social formation—the polis—in which he conceptualized them; while the second bears more directly on the continuities as well as the modifications that led historically from this classical system to later, medieval views on the matter.
Let us look again at these concepts. Even the description of anger is completely alien to the contemporary reader: Aristotle defines it as the reaction to a “slight,” an offense, an insult (implied as much as articulated). But is this what I feel when I am unnecessarily clumsy or fail to put something together according to the directions on the box? Is this exactly what is involved when I find someone else incompetently making a mess of a perfectly simple job?
There is even more to it than that: “anger may be defined as an impulse, accompanied by pain, to a conspicuous revenge for a conspicuous slight directed without justification toward what concerns oneself or toward what concerns one’s friends.”22 The word conspicuous, several times stressed, is important insofar as it signals the necessarily public nature of the slight (and its public reparation). But what is even more striking is the affirmation of an inextricable relationship between anger and vengeance, not particularly evident in our modern examples but clearly enough central (if not obsessive) in all the classics from Homer to Shakespeare, where the Elizabethan obsession with revengers’ tragedies of all kinds is even more pronounced than in Greek tragedy. Is this to be read as an inexpungeable trace of the old, omnipresent lex talionis, softened in capitalist times by the “douceur du commerce”? At any rate, both these features raise suspicions, not only about the nonsubjective nature of Aristotelian emotions (his analysis did after all focus on their uses in oratory and public deployment), but also about the radical differences between this supposedly democratic Athenian society, this citystate or polis so universally admired by our Western political theorists, and the dynamics of our modern world.
The crucial clue is given in the following offhand remark of the Stagirite, part of a well-nigh dramaturgical exploration of the situations in which anger arises (and can be subdued): “We are not angry with people we fear or respect, as long as we fear or respect them; you cannot be afraid of a person and also at the same time angry with him.”23 This will surely be felt as an odd view indeed, until we begin to appreciate to what degree Aristotle’s system, and Greek or at least Athenian society generally, is criss-crossed and saturated by yet another fundamental binary opposition we have not yet mentioned: that of social hierarchy and the all-embracing contrast between high and low, between those above me in the social scheme of things and those below. Indeed, on closer inspection everything seemingly random or empirical about Aristotle’s selection of emotions for his basic list falls into place around this fundamental opposition. We cannot be angry with people above us, people we respect or fear: indeed, a slight administered by one of them is much more likely to arouse fear than it is anger. It is around this axis that the systematicity of Aristotle’s theory of the passions is organized, an axis that accounts for the peculiar and rather for modern tastes offensive account of pity and also for the terminal position of emulation, which sums everything up (and is virtually positioned as a kind of variation on envy): the imitation of my betters, the rivalry with my equals, the unremitting competition of this society, which Pericles praises as “rash” and “reckless” (in Nietzsche’s translation) and for which David Konstan’s characterization seems rather mild:
the world that Aristotle evokes in his account of the emotions is highly competitive. It would appear that the Greeks were constantly jockeying to maintain or improve their social position or that of dear ones, and were deeply conscious of their standing in the eyes of others. When ordinary people stepped out of the house and into the streets of Athens, they must, on the basis of the picture Aristotle draws, have been intensely aware of relative degrees of power and their own vulnerability to insult and injury.24
In fact, this is a truly terrifying view of a social formation that has aroused admiration at least since the Renaissance and has been for many cultures the very image of an ideal communal organization and of egalitarian social relations (save for women and slaves). But it was René Girard who reminded us (from the most intelligent conservative standpoint) that it is the most egalitarian societies that are the most rivalrous, the most litigious, and the most given to competition for status and prestige, and thereby to the central passion of envy, with its accompanying violence. (Indeed, I am tempted to rewrite Aristotle’s emphasis on revenge very much in that spirit.)
We also tend to forget Hegel’s insistence on the contradictions of the polis: the famous Antigone chapter of the Phenomenology does not take sides between the family (the clan) and the state but rather charts the irresolvable structural tension that will spell the end of both and accounts for the disappearance of the Greek world organized around the city-state. (In his Aesthetics it will live its demise in satire and laughter and in the transformation of the Olympians into sheer caricature.) It is the political form of the city-state (whether it be Athens, the Italian communes, or Rousseau’s Geneva) which knows an absolute structural limit—one historically transcended by the unique promotion of one of them into that structurally very different social formation which was Rome, or Empire as such, a form now projecting a new universal religion (which ends up turning the pagan gods and personifications into so many demons).
Here we reach the vital center of this whole argument: the constitutive relationship between the system of emotions and the social formation itself. The face-to-face Utopia is a suffocating society, in which everyone knows everyone else and the citizens (the males) live in public at all times. Social life is a perpetual judgment: everyone is judged (seen) at all times and at all times judges everyone else. Not even friendship (a kind of truce, a sham equality) is free from its imminent danger. Only modern aristocracies, modern ethnic groups, or Barbara Rosenwein’s “emotional communities”25 can use such intimate group structures positively, but they do so primarily as a defense against that larger form which is the nation-state.
What takes the place of the city-state in the ancient world—the universal Empire—is a rather different kind of equality, that of the subjects in the face of that lone supreme Subject who is the emperor (until his structural place is taken by God himself). The stifling otherness of the polis—fantasized as a homeland by the modern metropolis—gives way to a different kind of permanent judgment in the desert wastes of the anchorites; and the Aristotelian (and Stoic) systems are transformed into the various systems of sins that no antique “virtues” can redeem. It is a transformation that takes place as it were behind the back of the Empire and its legions and bureaucrats; the foundational assassination of Julius Caesar is in reality fulfilled by the execution of Christ in a properly allegorical procedure.
This momentous transformation can best be measured by three fundamental developments. The first, already touched on, is the substitution of a ubiquitous and internal Other, whose presence is the source of tireless observation and judgment, for the suffusion of otherness and judgment in the daily life of the older city-state. This internalization will bring subjectivity into view as something like an autonomous space in its own right: not the habits and customs we attribute to premodern peoples and their externally observed behavior, but rather a space of what we like to think of as self-consciousness or reflexivity in which self-judgment is always possible, bringing relativism with it, and in which, virtually for the first time, the construction of subjectivity can itself be witnessed in action. Virtually all theories of modernity—most of which, as I have tried to show elsewhere,26 fail to acknowledge their own representational dilemmas—turn on the emergence of individuality, self-consciousness (Descartes), Western humanism, and the like in ways that are no longer satisfactory in the context of globalization. If I locate the infrastructural preconditions of this contemporary construction of subjectivity in population, this has little enough to do with sheer number, or with universality either as a logical category, but rather with the cultural diversity confronted by a “democratic” religion (or an imperial ideology). Allegory is itself a first sign and symptom of such radical cultural differences as it seeks to reconcile Judaic, Roman, and many other mentalities and to invent transcoding systems capable of accommodating them. Theology itself, as a figural system, is an attempt to construct “hegemonic empty signifiers” able to achieve something similar on a vaster scale.27
The second significant feature of the process will then involve the adaptation of the older classical systems of emotions to the new framework, something that includes two fundamental steps or stages. In the first stage, the classical oppositions between pleasure and pain will be sublated into that between positive and negative, and virtually all the codified or named emotions will be revalenced into negative quantities and marked as sins. The process underscores the function of taboo in the construction of subjectivities, which, as with toilet training in individual psychological formation, must necessarily rely on exclusionary violence (inasmuch as pleasure is not natural but learned and positive incentives are thereby “unnatural” and derived or secondary supplements). But what must be underscored in the present context is that for human animals, language learning is the primary form of such violence; and we have already insisted on the way in which naming is a first form of alienation. The emotion in question is thus disciplined first and foremost by its endowment with a name, which marks its difference, separates it off from the phenomenological stream, and thereby opens it to judgment, evaluation, and taboo. Aristotelian society was in that sense “other-directed” and reinforced its emotional systems by shame and by social hierarchy; the new imperial world system must, however, revise these names into a set of sins, in which internal guilt can be called upon to reinforce some more external policing system.
But there is yet another peculiar feature of “anger” as a named concept which has significant consequences in a different direction, namely for the transition to properly Christian systems of emotion as well as the dawning gap between the Aristotelian and the Stoic views on emotion and what is to be done with it. The Greimas semiotic square28 (which ultimately derives from Aristotelian logic in the first place) is useful at this point: the crucial clues as to the difference between the systems of emotions of the various cultures (or historical periods) can generally be found in their omissions, in the absences of the positions one would expect them to fill (such as grief, in the Aristotelian table of the elements), and in the new functions for which such additions or blank spots prepare them. The Greimas square is an instrument for detecting such gaps or absences and thereby for preparing a comparative superposition of systems, as one might lay one transparency upon another.
The square had as its philosophical (and linguistic or semiotic) intent the enlargement of the starting point of structural linguistics in the simple binary opposition—one of those luminous principles about which it can be said, like the Cartesian cogito, that its conceptual productivity depends on being able to get out of it in the first place. Now, in its more elaborated form in the square, we find two distinct binary oppositions set in relationship with one another (not unlike Louis Hjelmslev’s analogous four-term system) in such a way that the ambiguities of a given term become its field of exploration and expansion, rather than its breakdown in confusion.
The semiotic square in other words disambiguates by way of two distinct negations, the one specific, the other general. (That their logical nomenclature should be the contrary and the contradiction, respectively, in the reverse of a modern dialectical terminology is little more than an annoying technical problem.) An initial term, in other words, will stand in an inextricable relationship of negation and definition with a specific opposite number, at the same time that in a more general way its meaning will be generally cordoned off from everything it is not. It seems appropriate to reserve the term “binary opposition” for the first of these negations, which is more generally social and situation-specific, X and anti-X, for example; while the second is the simpler yet more generalized negation, namely non-X:
What happens in the missing fourth position, which ought to be labeled non-anti-X, is the speculative moment of this analysis and involves, as we shall see, an interpretive leap.
The relevance of this seemingly overcomplicated apparatus becomes clearer in the context of the topic just raised, namely the position of anger in the Aristotelian system of emotions. For in light of the Greimas square it will immediately be clear that what is anomalous about anger is that it has no binary opposite, something no doubt as exasperating for Aristotle as for us, inasmuch as his preference lies in the sorting out of emotional phenomena into just such pairings. To be sure, he supplies a term for the missing “emotion”—praotes—a word whose translation poses well-nigh insuperable problems. Liddell and Scott propose soothing or taming, but these words are dramatistic, as Kenneth Burke might say: they inevitably suggest a whole impersonal scene, in which one person tames or soothes the affected party (two quite different operations, one might add). A standard translation of the Rhetoric proposes the term calming down but that also, in its evasive wavering between transitive and intransitive, does not seem to be any more adequate for Aristotle’s requirements here (why not call it pacification?). In the most admirable and extensive book on the Aristotelian emotions, David Konstan follows this usage, finally, however, proposing an alternative in one of Hegel’s favorite words, satisfaction: but that is a good deal more than a mere translation, it is a whole philosophical program in its own right and not necessarily to be attributed to Aristotle.
One sees what the translators—and indeed, the philosopher himself—meant by these various attempts (the Greek word is itself a kind of translation in its own right): the opposite of anger is no longer being angry or perhaps not getting angry in the first place. In short, it is not an emotion, it is simply a state of nonanger, and, as essentially privative, to be ranged among all the other feelings and emotions to be dropped into that particular non-X box. But it is not an anti-anger, as serenity, for example, might be: but serenity already has its own opposite, which is surely something closer to worry (the Heideggerian Sorge).
This is then the moment to turn to our other missing term, namely the fourth one, or in other words non-anti-X, or in other words something that is neither anger nor its mysterious opposite. I believe that what emerges at this point is not the absence of anger but the absence of emotion altogether, and that the distinction marks the watershed between the two lines of Graeco-Roman ethics, which may be identified as the Platonic-Aristotelian and the Stoic, respectively. For the former, dealing with the emotions, which they called passions (Cicero calls them turbulences), meant finding or inventing a. harmony among them, as the Aristotelian search for a “mean” may already have suggested. Thus the solution to the problem of finding an opposite for anger will involve a kind of splitting of the thing itself and a reorganization of the opposition around that between justified or righteous anger and a type we moderns might characterize as irrational.
But the Stoic “solution” is quite different: it involves the attempt to rid oneself of emotion or passion altogether: not the management of anger, its domestication into a tolerable and even socially useful kind as opposed to a destructive force, but its thoroughgoing elimination in the name of apatheia, the absence of all emotions (and perhaps a more meaningful candidate for the proper use of a term like serenity).
There is, however, another way of looking at all this. We have hitherto restricted ourselves to logical categories; it will now be more productive to rethink the problem in terms of Gestalt psychology, where a figure (or form) is in general opposed to a “ground” and where we may observe the beginnings of a more properly allegorical process. For in order for anger to constitute a distinctive figure in its own right, it will require a neutral background; just as the experience of anger will only be consciously and dramatically perceptible when it erupts against a background of calm (of a momentarily Stoic apatheia).
At this point the investigation turns into a representational problem: how can an emotion like anger best be staged? In a struggle with its opposite number? Or against the background of a lack of feeling? (The classic situation will obviously be one in which Nestor, or some other equally wise counselor, urges calm and moderation on his angry colleague, Achilles or Agamemnon, gripped by an uncontrollable rage.)
To put it another way, do we always feel emotion? Is emotion a permanent feeling-tone of human life, whose contents are in constant flux and modification, but which persists in one form or another throughout the waking day? Or are we mostly in a state of mild and reasonable activity or contemplation which is merely from time to time interrupted by those overwhelming perturbations we know as the emotions or the passions? To put it this way is to see that the first alternative confronts us, not with “normal” human beings, but rather with a pathological individual at every moment caught up in drama and in obsessive self-absorption and immoderate feelings: someone with whom, as they say, it would be difficult to live.
There is a kind of claustrophobia about such an existence, in which emotions succeed each other without a pause, and in which it becomes difficult to distinguish or even to represent them with any specificity, unless, indeed, one invents a new name for the whole series, for the flow itself, taken not as one distinct emotion following another, but rather a pathological process in its own right: a single overwhelming feeling or character trait, which can only be observed and represented by contrast with that “ground” that is the feeling tone of “normal” people. Strindberg was surely the epic poet of such a pathology, of which Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s film Winter Sleep gives a recent representation. It is most often, however, to be found in the battle of the sexes, as in Albee’s classic Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?; but Ceylon’s figure is more reminiscent of Dostoyevsky and old man Karamazov.
Meanwhile, it certainly seems possible for the “ground” itself, that absence of emotion against which the specific emotion is perceived and registered (and recognized by name), to turn into a kind of emotion in its own right, at which point it can itself be openly diagnosed as a pathology, an indifference of the type identified as depression, if not as that melancholy which has taken such a central place in affect theory. The “ground” then, the nonemotional background against which the individual emotion is itself perceived, is an ambiguous space that can be foregrounded in its own right under certain circumstances (those of daily life, ideology, social formation) when it is not simply attributed to other people as they form a kind of objective background to my own subjective “stream of turbulences.”
There will be more to say about this, but for the moment I want to suggest that it is the perception of the emotion as such, as it is observed in its eruption against the background of that peaceful void of the nonemotion generally, that is also the very emergence of allegory. The emotion—anger, say—is already allegorical in its own right, insofar as we perceive it as a separate entity and (what is even more important) ratify that perception by endowing it with a specific name (in other words, the word anger).
In a sense, then, the formal problem of some neutral ground against which to identify the (now allegorical) emotion is at one with the moral or psychological therapeutic question of a cure for the emotions or “turbulences” generally. Aristotle’s problem—finding a specific opposite number to the named emotion called anger—has morphed into the more general one of a relief from emotions altogether, a state not available in the Aristotelian system but which the Stoics found themselves able to name apatheia or ataraxia.
The real question lies here: whether we experience emotions all the time (such is, I think, the premise of affect theory), or whether we are normally free of emotions in such a way as to undergo their intermittent ravages as a genuine event, as a specific and distinctive experience that can be described and theorized. The adherents of moderation suggest that we cannot do away with emotions altogether but must find some way of living with them and of minimizing their harmfulness; thus, for example, they do not recommend doing away with anger, which can be righteous, as we put it, but only of avoiding its excesses. And of course the insistence with which, following Aristotle, I have stressed the emotions of the citizens of the polis gives us another, different but analogous, and equally inescapable picture of a reality we can never escape, and in which we can never hope for some absolute freedom from incessant reactions to our social world.
Stoicism, meanwhile, would seem to offer the hope of a place outside the social world in which a certain relief is at least momentarily possible, dependent on our moral outlook, from a system of emotions which is an uninterrupted series of reactions to those omnipresent others who constitute the polis as such. This is the sense in which Stoic psychology can be seen to reflect the vaster social space of the emergent Roman world that eventually replaces the network of the closed city-states in which Aristotelian psychology was at home.
And this is also the moment to affirm the fundamental argument in play here, which has hitherto only sporadically surfaced: the identification between the system of emotions in question and the structure and dimensions of the collectivity in which individuals feel and identify them. Just as in a simpler world, radical differences were evident between the psychology of country people and those of the big city with its anonymity and labyrinthine space, so now one can observe a transformation of the psychology of the citizens of the city-state, as they were codified by Aristotle, and those that emerge from that unique city-state which supplants the Greek (and Alexandrian) system and whose imperial universality eventually endows itself with the elaboration of a new kind of universal religion. The stifling Greek social life, subject to an uninterrupted sociability that inevitably stimulates that continuous irritation of the individual psyche we interpret in a stream of recognizably modern “emotions” now slowly gives way to a cosmopolitanism and a stream of anonymous encounters only comparable to Georg Simmel’s descriptions of the modern metropolis as a set of continuous stimuli that can no longer be handled by classical methods.29
The new universal and imperial religion will come at the problem (which is in reality one of cultural revolution) in a different way from the Stoics, who promised their elites the possibility of temporary withdrawals and intermittent relief. It will rearrange the relationship between traditional psychology and those other systems of judgment and classification that are the separation between the physical and the mental (body and soul) and the axis of pleasure and pain, thereby allowing a negative judgment to be extended to all the “turbulences” indifferently, in that codification of emotions as sins we owe to the great Evagrius in the declining years of the fourth century AD. It is a genealogy which explains why the so-called theological virtues, which endow the sins with a well-nigh Aristotelian opposite number, have initially nothing to do with this first system but are, scholars tell us, a later grafting, which clearly presents practical and pastoral (even, as with Dante, poetic) advantages, but which is scarcely intellectually rigorous at this point in the transition.
Meanwhile (and this is the crucial development), a new foyer of otherness is created—one that can be international and universal by way of the omnipresence of God—to replace that inescapable and implacable permanent process of judgment and the struggle of reputations in the classical polis. The Greeks had a diffuse system of friend and foe, of superior and inferior, to organize their subjectivities so as to create value and make evaluation possible. Now, however, a disembodied witness, an omnipresent Other, can replace all those immediate judgments and make possible the prolongation of this hitherto far more immediate and social system of emotions even in the desert and its unpeopled wastes: the desert now becomes the theater and the locus of the intellectual capital city of this Roman world, Alexandria, which, neither Jerusalem nor Rome, houses that fundamental struggle between Greek philosophy and Judaic religion that will transform the subjectivities of the ancient world.
The judgment of God, then, permits a new kind of introspection, in which I can follow his inventory, as in a mirror, of my inner events and gradually experience them in some new and interiorized form. The codification of the emotions as sins now for the first time allows a characterology to appear, a synthesis of the Aristotelian system of emotions and its counterpart in physical doctrine, most notably that of the four humors. Now for the first time a table of figures becomes possible in which physical and physiological positions combine with emotional dominants and subordinates to produce caricatural stereotypes of the various structurally possible configurations of the social world. Allegory is reborn with this possibility of a systemic review of social positions; linking characterology with external class and geographical (ethnic) positions, it releases that flood of images which organizes our social experience from Theophrastus to the modern ethnic hatreds and racisms. The inner register of possible sins, which constructs a new and interiorized subjectivity, then links up with external features to make a daily mapping of social experience possible even at the scale of worldwide cultural stereotypes.
Now I have dwelt on this historical transition so insistently for a reason, which has to do with its analogy to contemporary developments. The supersession of the polis by the empire presents many analogies with the vaster scale of the contemporary supersession of the national by globalization. The forms of experience of the nation-state were, to be sure, in many ways as oppressive as those of the polis, imposing an oppressive national identity on its subjects but at the same time releasing an extraordinary flourishing of cultural speculation and production. Today, it is the national formative limits that risk dissolution in the newly global reorganization of capitalism, which threatens to invalidate all the categories of national modernity and national modernism and to transform them into new social and psychological formations we can today only imperfectly imagine, but of which the Soviet revolution and the new images of socialism that emerged from it remain a significant anticipation, as does religious revival and religio-political rivalry on a world scale (Alain Badiou’s identification of Saint Paul with Lenin is here symptomatic): both in some sense foreshadowings of the standardization and universal commodification of the world market.
As for Stoic apatheia, it survives at best in the concept of a state of grace, or in some “third” state of consciousness beyond the physical and the mental alike, which—paradoxical anticipation of Joachim’s tripartite history, Spinoza’s third kind of knowledge, or even of the Hegelian moment of the “speculative”—Origen already posits as an ultimate term of the purification of the soul.
This glorification of a salvational lack of feeling as some virtually unattainable perfection of spiritual development will have already implicitly transformed the earlier static or synchronic systems of emotions into a new kind of dynamic one, most dramatically in Dante’s version in Purgatorio (as opposed to the eternally static rings of Inferno). Dante went on to try to project a hierarchy of perfectabilities in Paradiso, but other forms of a pure or purified consciousness are also conceivable (as most famously with the Cartesian cogito). What is then novel is this reorientation of the universal scheme in a temporal or developmental (even historical) direction.
As for the various systems of the emotions themselves, we have previewed their attempts to move toward a kind of materialist monism earlier in this chapter. This spells the end of personification, whose ramifications are dealt with later in this book. It also has the result of restructuring the structural system of the emotions in several consequential ways and in particular in generating the same kind of high–low bifurcation to be observed in the modernist moment of literature, in which an elite or experimental high literature separates itself from a lowbrow entertainment production organized by a nascent culture industry.
On the more noble, philosophical level, the waning of the named emotions has had rather different and sometimes quite unexpected results. Affect theory is surely in one sense a predictable reaction to the psychological materialism and monism set in motion by Hobbes and culminating in cognitive brain study. Dialectically, it is less surprising that these two seemingly antithetical research interests of affect and physiology should combine in various proposals for this or that specific linkage. Nor can it ultimately have been any great shock to neutral observers to witness a resurgence of the old materialist–idealist debates today, at a time when the older idealisms and spiritualisms have virtually disappeared.
What is symptomatically more interesting is that return to a Kantian problematic (and even an improbable revival of Whitehead!), which has been publicized under the slogans of “speculative realism” and “object-oriented ontology” and which offers us a “democracy of things” in which humans and inanimate things are dealt with as equals, and Nature and whatever you want to call its opposite (consciousness? spirit? life?) are no longer divided along subject–object lines. The connection between affect theory and this new turn toward objects and the inanimate is described thus by one of its most astute commentators:
the thing withdraws into its network, luring me into the shadows, and it bursts forth in a splendor that dazzles and blinds me … The “lure for feeling” [Whitehead] is anything that, in some way, works to capture my attention. It may entice me, or incite me, or seduce me, or tempt me, or compel me, or even bludgeon and bully me … things proposition me or … they offer me certain “promesse de Bonheur” (Stendhal).30
For a more dispassionate observer (for whom philosophies, as indispensable as they are in articulating new feelings and relations to a historically world, are still essentially symptoms), the new philosophy reflects the coming of what Wyndham Lewis used to call “the human age,” that is, the obliteration of a former nature by man-made objects of all kinds (very much including the information technology which constitutes a dialectically new stage in this humanization). The commodity world having become a “second nature” (to use Lukács’s formulation), we rightly now obscurely feel that we are, in some way, among ourselves: this is then some final stage of reification (a word the object-oriented philosophers ought proudly to reclaim), in which we may expect all the old systems of emotions to play some part, just like the attraction–repulsion formula dramatized by Shaviro above. But affect theory has the advantage of overruling the distinctive bundles of particulars and characteristics mobilized by the emotional systems, in favor of flows and unarticulated rising and falling scales that dissolve the hitherto named moments into a multiplicity of feelings it is both impossible and unnecessary to name or to differentiate.
Yet from a historical perspective the ontological debates are irrelevant: if nature has changed and become absorbed by technological humanization, the possibility was already there, in nature itself. If human nature changed again (say around 1980), then the new changes were also present in potentia; and in any case, there is no such thing as human nature and probably no such thing as nature, either. But in place of the idea of a global transformation of the world of objects into so many sentient beings (along with the call for a concomitant adaptation of our subjectivities), I would propose to substitute a postmodern Malthusianism, in which it is the immense and inconceivable proliferation of otherness in our now unrepresentable “globalized” species population which takes precedence over and indeed subsumes all these other undeniable developments. This is the context in which we may eventually expect a new table of emotions and of their names (or their un-naming) to emerge.