Affective Disorder

William Egginton

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

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

For additional information about this article

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

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AFFECTIVE DISORDER

WILLIAM EGGINTON

The recent emergence of affect as a focus of research in the humanities would appear to exhibit all the requisite elements for constituting a turn in critical parlance and focus. Numerous monographs and countless articles have taken up the topic, and several anthologies of articles have been published in the past few years.1 More importantly, the concept is circulating in a number of disciplines, including political science, literary and media theory, and neuroscience. If affect has come into focus in response to a specific need or urgency, it now makes sense to ask whether the term and the theoretical advances it ostensibly enables live up to the promise scholars have seen in it. As I argue in what follows, the current deployment of the concept of affect suffers from a disjunction between its potential utility and the promise projected on it by contemporary theorists. Specifically, the power of the vocabulary inspired by Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattaris interventions of the 1970sand stemming from Deleuzes earlier engagements with the philosophy of Baruch Spinozaimplicitly and at times explicitly invokes the promise that a critical perspective focused on affect can avoid the pitfalls of individual subjectivity and symbolic mediation in elucidating a dimension of relations between persons or beings that is direct or immediate. To attempt to understand the functioning of affect without recourse to subjectivity, however, is akin to studying the phenomenon of color free of the interference created by light. In other words, a coherent understanding of affect demonstrates that its dimension is properly defined by the thorough interpenetration of bodies and mediation and, perhaps most strikingly, by how the limits imposed by subjectivitys horizon of opacity in turn affect the subject in corporeal ways. To the extent that theories of affect have hoped for new ethical possibilities to emerge from a thinking oriented toward the affective dimension, those theories must grapple with the paradoxes of mediation that were already central for Spinozas own attempts to develop a system of thought void of the weaknesses he saw in that of Descartes. What early modern thinkers like Spinoza and David Hume, another early influence of Deleuzes, intuited was how ethical questions are, by their very nature, inextricably bound to the subjects blindness as to the desires and intentions of others and, ultimately, to important aspects of his or her own as well. While the transmission of affect is both real and a profoundly important quality of communication, the question the human being faces of what I ought to do not only cannot be relieved by such communications, it rebounds mercilessly on the affects and remains a relentless engine of our affective lives. >> The Promise of Affect While the concept of affect is important in a number of fields, its recent popularity in the humanities can generally be traced to two sources: Eve Kosofky Sedgwick and Adam Franks use of the theories of Silvan Tomkins,2 and the above-mentioned engagement with the Deleuzian-Spinozist tradition that was refueled in the mid 1990s by Brian Massumis article, The Autonomy of Affect, later included as the lead essay in his 2002 book, Parables for the Virtual.3 In this essay I focus exclusively on the second trajectory,

William Egginton is the Andrew W. Mellon Professor in the Humanities and Chair of the Department of German and Romance Languages and Literatures at the Johns Hopkins University, where he teaches on Spanish and Latin American literature, literary theory, and the relation between literature and philosophy. He is the author of several books including How the World Became a Stage (2003), The Philosopher's Desire (2007), andIn Defense of Religious Moderation (2010). His next book, The Man Who Invented Fiction, will be published by Bloomsbury in 2014.

DIACRITICS Volume 40.4 (2012) 2443 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

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as I do not see Tomkinss theory or its adherents as being motivated by the same concerns, which I will now outline.4 Patricia Ticineto Clough gives an excellent sense of the appeal of writing about affect in the opening pages of her introduction to The Affective Turn. The scholars contributing to the volume, treat affectivity as a substrate of potential bodily responses, often autonomic responses, in excess of consciousness. For these scholars, affect refers generally to bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a bodys capacity to act, to engage, and to connect, such that autoaffection is linked to the self-feeling of being alivethat is, aliveness or vitality.5 Like other principal voices in the new affect theory, Clough is careful to assure the reader that the shift of critical attention toward the affective register does not entail a replacement for or exclusion of attention paid to the important role played by meaning, identity, subjectivity, and the individual in understanding human sociality. It is hard not to detect, however, a lingering note of hope accompanying almost all claims staked by affect theory to occupy a middle ground engaging equally the body and the mind or involving both reason and the passions,6 a hope that the new critical vocabulary will go beyond mediating such dualisms and break new ground altogether. Massumi writes in the introduction to his watershed Parables for the Virtual about the motivations for his project: It was based on the hope that movement, sensation, and qualities of experience couched in matter in its most literal sense (and sensing) might be culturally-theoretically thinkable, without falling into either the Scylla of nave realism or the Charybdis of subjectivism and without contradicting the very real insights of poststructuralist cultural theory concerning the coextensiveness of culture with the eld of experience and of power with culture. The aim was to put matter unmediatedly back into cultural materialism, along with what seemed most directly corporeal back into the body.7 Key to this explanation is the negative adverb prominently at work in the last sentence. Massumi begins his book with a critique of humanists previous attempts to introduce the body and its matter into their debates, but only ever as mediated by discourse: The body was seen to be centrally involved in these everyday practices of resistance. But this thoroughly mediated body could only be a discursive body: one with its signifying gestures.8 The recourse to the body as a mediated construct, he argues, fails to return to the body at all, for if such bodies are involved in sense as meaning, sensation is utterly redundant to their description. Or worse, it is destructive to it, because it appeals to an unmediated experience.9 A goal, then, of Massumis intervention is to offer a corrective of a corrective, to re orient a turn to the body that ended up not being about the body back to the body, and not just as an effect of cultural mediations of one sort or another. In doing so he preempts the critical reaction that his position appeals to an unmediated experience, and does so not by repudiating that appeal, but by locating the reason for that reaction in one potential consequence of the appeal, namely, subjectivism, and then repudiating that. In other

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words, Massumis appeal to the immediate is not to be confused with the immediacy we might attribute to an individual distinguishing between what is directly available to his or her senses and what he or she can only access through the mediation of anothers report. On the contrary, in a vocabulary he derives from Gilbert Simondon, affects are pre-individual.10 From this perspective, the subjects consciousness or emotional state at any one time is the actualization or subtraction from its virtual field of possibilities: Affects are virtual synesthetic perspectives anchored in (functionally limited by) the actually existing, particular things that embody them. The autonomy of affect is its participation in the virtual. Its autonomy is its openness. Affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes connement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, it is.11 The autonomy of the essays title refers, then, to affects escape from the capture of individuation; the virtual is the realm of its theoretical concern, a realm not bounded by an individual subjects actual borders. Thus, while Massumis invocation of the immediacy of affect appears to be a response to a disingenuous return to bodies and matter that was really about how we only ever have mediated access to bodies and matter, its promise in fact lies elsewhere, namely, in the invocation of a realm of feeling or experience not limited by an individuals subjective sphere.12 This is why the vocabulary he develops has been embraced by scholars seeking a kind of liberating move from, in Cloughs words, a psychoanalytically informed criticism of subject identity, representation, and trauma to an engagement with information and affect; from privileging the organic body to exploring nonorganic life.13 Indeed, Massumi himself notes that, in Simondons analysis, self-reflection, once regarded as the exclusive domain of the human, extends to all living things, though, he goes on to say, it is hard to see why his own analysis does not force him to extend it to all things, living or not.14 One of the potential advantages of identifying a realm of experience exceeding individual, subjective, or even human bounds is that it opens the possibility of an approach to understanding aspects of otherness traditionally held to be obscured from our knowledge. Diminution or shifting of the barriers of epistemological privilege associated with subjectivity implies the possibility of modes of communication and understanding that surpass limits once thought of as absolute. Such possibilities have immediate ethical ramifications. If I now know what it is like to be a bat, this fact has implications for how I ought to treat a bat, and likewise for any value replacing bat.15 Theories regarding the transmission of affect lay implicit claim to such a paradigm shift, a kind of heterophenomenology16 that has long been the dream of artificial intelligence and neuroscience, and was once the presumed future even from Freuds outlook. But what form could such knowledge take? What would it mean to know what it is like to be another, and does the concept of affect bring us any closer to that knowledge? While it may seem that I have shifted the discussion back to a set of concerns that affect theory has pointedly repudiated, it turns out that the conceptual apparatus of affect as set out by Spinoza was inspired by precisely such questions; that is to say, the turn to affect was always about the challenge of subjectivity.

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>> The Challenge of Subjectivity In a recent article tracing the genealogy of affect theory to Spinoza, Caroline Williams identifies the key utility of the concept for political thought: Affect is also desubjectifying in an important respect as for Spinoza it is also a kind of force or power that courses through and beyond subjects. Thus, it cannot easily be inscribed within the borders of subjectivity.17 By refusing to confine the discussion of political agency and manipulation to the desires, motivations, and identifications of a subject, the concept of affect as derived from Spinoza purportedly allows for a more nuanced, complete understanding of how subjects communicate and influence one another within the body politic, and how political subjects come to be in the first place. This is certainly an important insight, given that subjects dont arrive on the political scene fully formed but rather originate in given political realities that exceed them and are largely formative of them. Specifically, Spinozas model permits an understanding of the subject and its ideas as a material extension of the body politic in both space and time: Thus, Spinoza writes that the human mind perceives a great many bodies together with the nature of its own body (E II Prop 16 Cor 1). Spinoza further considers how the recollection of one experience may trigger imaginative associations with similar ones. In this way, imagination, image and memory are intimately tied to affective and corporeal existence. Furthermore, there will always exist an unconscious affectus imitatio within the process of imaginary identications constituting a political body as citizens of a demos, a nation and so on. Thus, if we imagine something like us to be affected with the same affect, this imagination will express an affection of our Body like this affect (E III Prop 27 Dem).18 In other words, contrary to the notion of a well-bounded subject working its will and being influenced in various ways in the crowded polis, the Spinozist model defines the mind as the idea the subject has of its body, a body itself constituted by its affections, present and past. Neither the body, the past of that body, nor the realm of others constituting its present can fail to exist or, for that matter, be considered secondary to the subject, because they are presupposed as the very object of which the mind is the idea. In writing the Ethics, Spinoza was proposing a profound and far-reaching solution to what he saw as a fundamental problem in the leading philosophical system of his day. If some of his earliest published writings were critical responses to Ren Descartes, the Ethics was an attempt to rewrite ontology and epistemology after Descartes so as to propose a foundation for political and ethical knowledge. The problem Spinoza sought to rectify stemmed from Descartess distinction between corrigible and incorrigible knowledge. In Descartess example, if I see a chimera, I may rightly doubt that what I am seeing is a chimera, but I cannot doubt that I am seeing something I take to be a chimera.19 The distinction is essential because it grounds the entire system of substances, res cogitans being based on what one cannot doubt, res extensa on what one can. While God is invoked to stitch the network together,20 Descartes still leaves an enormous philosophical question mark on any attempt to ground a politics or ethics, since the very existence of a world outside the subject has to be taken on faith.

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In the first of his two books on Spinoza, published in 1968, Deleuze explains how Descartes rejected the exaggerated pretensions of a synthetic approach to knowledge in favor of a more modest analytic approach that, by eliciting a clear and distinct perception of the effect ... provides us with a means of inferring from that perception a true knowledge of the cause.21 As Deleuze goes on to argue, Spinoza refuses Descartess assumption that the synthetic method must make real knowledge of things in the world dependent on abstract universals. For Spinozas synthetic method, by contrast, the formal cause of an idea is never an abstract universal; rather, the formal cause of a true idea is our power of understanding, which permits thought to go from one real being to another without passing through abstract things.22 Descartess difficulty comes when he concedes that he has no way of knowing that the creator made him such that what he perceives clearly and distinctly (incorrigibly) is in fact correct, which follows from the assertion that we cannot in fact know God through Himself. Despite this difficulty Descartes insists that we can come to have certain knowledge of Gods existence by accurately attending to the inferences that lead us from what we know clearly and distinctly to that belief. To this Spinoza dryly remarks in an early critical commentary on Descartes, this answer does not satisfy some people,23 and goes on to propose his own answer. His response, in contrast to Descartes, denies that we can have certainty of anything other than our own existence without first having a clear and distinct concept of God that makes us affirm that he is supremely veracious.24 Spinozas twist, then, is to undermine the viability of Descartess key distinction. Clear and distinct ideas of the kind upon which Descartes founds all knowledge can, in fact, serve no foundational role without an equally clear and distinct concept of God. But if knowledge of God and knowledge of our senses attain to the same level of clarity and distinction, there is in fact no internal or essential limitation to knowledge at all, no line in the sand between what may be known clearly and distinctly and what is barred from such epistemological privilege. The demolition of this distinction is, of course, exactly what attracts Deleuze, for whom, Spinozism cannot be considered apart from the contest it carries on against negative theology. He continues, Spinoza condemns not only the introduction of negativity into being, but all false conceptions of affirmation in which negativity remains as well. It is these survivals that Spinoza finds and contests in Descartes and the Cartesians.25 The negativity that Deleuze, via Spinoza, repudiates in Descartes is nothing other than the epistemological privilege of subjectivity. While this privilege can be and has been cast as affording the subject a kind of independence from the world, as when Descartes used it to ground the distinction between thinking and extended substance, it is nonetheless important to recognize that independence does not necessarily follow from the fact of epistemological privilege. But for Spinozaunder the influence of Descartess arguments but desiring

The negativity that Deleuze, via Spinoza, repudiates in Descartes is nothing other than the epistemological privilege of subjectivity.

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to affirm the possibility of certain knowledgeundermining epistemological privilege was a necessary step in eradicating dualism. To the extent that Spinozas arguments, and by extension Deleuzes as well, attack the pretensions of subjectivity or consciousness to autonomy and power, there can be no disagreement. Certainly Spinoza was insightful in the extent to which he grasped the limited nature of conscious thought in relation to what remains unthought. In Deleuzes words, It is a matter of showing that the body surpasses the knowledge that we have of it, and that thought likewise surpasses the consciousness that we have of it. . . . In short, the model of the body, according to Spinoza, does not imply any devaluation of thought in relation to extension, but, much more important, a devaluation of consciousness in relation to thought: a discovery of the unconscious, of an unconscious of thought just as profound as the unknown of the body.26 A powerful attraction of Spinozas philosophy is, for Deleuze, the intent he sees there to throw off an illusion; an illusion that consciousness creates to calm its anguish at being aware of only effects; an illusion that consciousness itself is its own cause; an illusion that, taken to its extreme, culminates in the anthropomorphization of God.27 Spinozas ethics is built on a new network of understanding that undermines or replaces the understanding consciousness thought it had, but that was based on false principles. Thus does ethics come to replace morality, where morality was the judgment of God,28 nothing but an illusory replacement of existence with transcendent values. Spinozas move, as we have seen, was to recognize that the subject is unthinkable as an independent entity, and from this recognition to build up a system or ladder explicating all the links constituting deus sive natura, thereby exposing the proper place and orientation of a persons ethical life.29 The theory of affects and affections is crucial in this regard because it is the operative mechanism allowing Spinoza to bridge the chasm of Descartess corrigibility problem. If my perception or idea is necessarily one I have of my body, and that body is constituted by affections past and present, there can be no neat distinction between what I can and cannot doubt, and hence no division of substances. In Rei Teradas words, affection appears, affect separates from it, climbs, is expressed, and half of it falls back into phenomenality while the other half remains in ontology, a realm like that of Deleuzes later consciousness without experience.30 To the extent, then, that modern affect theorists since Deleuze have located in the concept a kind of escape from subjectivity, they have been absolutely correctin theory. Subjectivity, however, is not merely a philosophical problem but also an existential one. While it is salutary to propose a theory that solves the philosophical problem by reconceptualizing the subject, it is also essential to recognize the existential problem that remains: reconceptualizing the subject does not and cannot alter the fact of the constitutive limitations structuring a subjects experience and knowledge of itself and others. These limitations are an inherent concern for any discussion of ethics, and have a vital role to play in affective life as well.

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>> The Heteronomy of Affect There is no doubt that affects can indeed communicate, and that they do so in ways that are often or even mostly imperceptible to consciousness. Indeed, aesthetic experience is, in some sense, entirely based on the transmission of affect through media. And neuroscience is making inroads into understanding how the brain reacts affectively to aesthetic and social stimuli. In one recent study that underlined how imperceptible the modes of the transmission of affect can be, it was demonstrated that the scent of a chemical in womens tears had a depressing effect on male sexual arousal.31 While the association of tears and the affective reduction of arousal may be unsurprising, that a pheromonic medium works directly at the hormonal level in addition to any cognitive grappling with the reasons behind the tears could certainly be considered news. Affects are capable of transmission through multiple means, in fact, and it is thus perfectly plausible that Spinoza, without the benefit of modern neuroscience, presciently attended to something like mirror neurons when he wrote that if we imagine something like us to be affected with the same affect, this imagination will express an affection of our Body like this affect.32 The point, then, is not to deny that an enormous and highly complex affective life contains and far exceeds the boundaries of subjectivity; this is both true and reason enough in itself to justify all the attention that the affective turn entails. Rather, what is crucial to emphasize is that extending the language of subjective experience to non-subjective or pre-individual phenomena or even nonorganic and inanimate matter does nothing to enable those who are subjects to escape from the capture of subjectivity. On the contrary, the capture of subjectivity is constitutive of ethics and is itself a powerful motor of affective life. As I mentioned at the outset of this essay, to the extent that there has been an affective turn in recent years that turn has been felt in several fields of inquiry, and the brain sciences may stand out as the most obvious of these. Researchers such as Antonio Damasio, Joseph LeDoux, and Jaak Panksepp have contributed to the neurosciences understanding of how the brain produces emotion, and how pervasive emotions are in mental life.33 In Damasios parlance, what I have been referring to as the affective dimension of experience would encompass both emotions and feelings, where emotions are the physical or externally detectable substrate of affective experience and feelings are the internal, private aspect as experienced by the subject. Like Deleuze, Damasio identifies Spinoza as an important influence and cites with approval his notion that the mind is an idea

Extending the language of subjective experience to non-subjective or preindividual phenomena or even nonorganic and inanimate matter does nothing to enable those who are subjects to escape from the capture of subjectivity.

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whose object is the body.34 In this version of Spinozist parallelism, emotions wrack the body, and feelings are the idea of those emotions in the mind. While feelings are conscious, in that we are aware of them, they can pertain to what Damasio calls core consciousness and not yet be narrated or identified with the linguistic markers used by the more self-aware extended consciousness.35 That said, what Damasio and other neuroscientists share is the conviction that the human brain is too complexly networked to allow for any facile distinctions between aspects of experience that are independent of cognition, just as cognition free of emotional influence is almost unthinkable.36 As Panksepp puts it, no single psychological concept fully describes the functions of any given brain area or circuit. There are no unambiguous centers or loci for discrete emotions in the brain that do not massively interdigitate with other functions, even though certain key circuits are essential for certain emotions to be elaborated. Everything ultimately emerges from the interaction of many systems.37 Adrian Johnston adds, commenting on this quotation from Panksepp, He subsequently links this fact to emotional phenomena, emphasizing that the brains mind-bogglingly intricate internal interconnectedness makes it such that emotions are inextricably intertwined with non-emotional (that is, cognitive and motivational) dimensions.38 The point, however, is not merely to stress how the findings of contemporary neuroscience undermine theoretical efforts to isolate affective life from the influence of such higher-level cognitive functions as consciousness; far more vital is the evidence of how tightly imbricated the affects are with that specific aspect of subjectivity I have identified as being the core nemesis of Deleuzian affect theory: namely, the negativity of subjectivity that characterizes epistemological privilege. Brain researchers have adopted in a variety of forms the taxonomy of emotions proposed by Sylvan Tomkins, which originally included the eight basic emotions: surprise, interest, joy, rage, fear, disgust, shame, and anguish.39 While variations have been suggested by neuroscientists and psychologists specializing in emotions, most influentially Paul Ekman,40 the consensus is that humans share a series of basic emotions with lower animals, but the derived or nonbasic emotions tend to be more uniquely human. Since the derived emotions are constructed by cognitive operations, they could only be the same to the extent that two animals share the same cognitive capacities.41 It does not take a great conceptual leap to see how even the basic emotions may be intricately associated with the orientation and location of a subjects self, its relation to others, and its inability to directly experience the feelings and desires of those others. Joy involves contentment with the limits of the self and a relaxation of attentiveness as to how those limits could expand or be impinged on; rage often arises in response to impingements of limits, such as slights to the ego; sadness arises from loss of a beloved object, or from the sense that the other does not love or desire the subject; shame is produced when something is exposed that the subject wished to keep hidden from others. The relation is even clearer with more complex emotions: love and desire involve expanding the limits to incorporate the other; hate involves the

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urge to retract those limits and reject otherness; and envy regards something the other has that we desire to take for our own. In all cases, while there is no doubt that the emotions are thoroughly physical, an ineradicable dimension of the affective experience is the horizon of opacity that characterizes subjective experience. To cite a fanciful example from Hume, were humans really to know the intention and desire of the other, to have hearts undivided between their interests and those of others, many of the affects we take for granted would never be invoked.42 To push the point further, a God-like omniscience could not experience affects because it would lack a subjects horizon of opacity. The very same logic led Immanuel Kant to deny God the possibility of making an ethical choice, for the very idea of ethics requires desire (which God could not have) and a lack of knowledge as to either others intentions or the future consequences of my actions.43 What is required for an ethical act is the commitment to act according to the right maxim, one derived solely from duty and irrespective of my inclination. But we need not be Kantian deontologists to see that any meaningful distinction defining ethical behavior from natural motivations requires the mediation of otherness, at the very minimum in the form of a question regarding the others desires and intentions. In a fascinating experiment studying the ability of chimpanzees to engage in altruistic behavior, researchers presented chimps with two plates containing different amounts of food. Chimps were asked to point to a plate, and when the plate they pointed to was the larger (as it invariably was), it was given to another chimp and the first received the smaller. While this led to a tremendous amount of howling and complaining on the part of the chimps, after hundreds and hundreds of trials, these chimps could not learn to withhold pointing to the larger reward.44 This result only changed when the chimps were taught some basic numeric symbols, which were then shown to them instead of the plates. With the aid of symbolic mediation, a kind of third-party intervention between the chimp and the object of its hunger, the chimps immediately learned to select the smaller portion in the hopes of eventually receiving the larger one themselves. While the numeric symbol clearly relativized the immediacy of the loaded plates, it also may have had the effect of creating a kind of cognitive representative of the others desire in the chimps brain. At its most basic, in other words, what a symbol can do is what Jacques Lacan said of the signifier in general, that it represents the subject for another signifier.45 The numeric symbol in this case had the effect of subjectifying the chimp. It represented the chimp as a cipher, a signifier for another, and represented that other as a cipher for the chimp. A basic reasoning process was thus enabled, more or less translatable as: what do I choose such that the other does what I want?itself a question ultimately based on a more fundamental one: what does the other want of me?46 The

A God-like omniscience could not experience affects because it would lack a subject's horizon of opacity.

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key here is to grasp how the deployment of symbolic mediation in the service of selfish goals has the side effect of opening the question of the others desire. The fundamental horizon of opacity defined by the question is thus the necessary foundation of any and all ethical behavior, as well as a powerful motivator of affective experience. >> The Theater of the Soul That we cannot experience first hand the perceptions and thoughts of another is an existential fact; but how that fact is articulated, understood, and perhaps itself experienced may well be subject to cultural and historical variation. The early modern debates around affective transmission that I have referenced thus far are united in conceiving of the problem in terms of what I have called theatricality.47 The pervasive cultural presence of the new theatrical institutions in early modern Europe provided a ready vocabulary and template for conceptualizing the experience of epistemological privilege, such that when Descartes located the foundation of philosophical inquiry in the very border between those ideas we can know clearly and distinctly and those we cannot, he could not help conceptualizing the problem in terms easily translatable from the skills and practices populaces could call on to engage with the theater.48 Descartess influence, as we have already discussed, was key to the development of a theory of subjective exceptionalism and independence that sparked the reaction of such thinkers as Spinoza and Hume, who in turn inspired Deleuze and the recent affective turn based on his thought. The image of thought that became the touchstone for these debates was that of the human mind or subject as a kind of theater, in which the phenomena of the world passed before the self like characters on a stage, making reference to an inaccessible world outside the theater and unified by a kind of meta-audience or spectator within. Hume writes in his monumental A Treatise of Human Nature, The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, re-pass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.49 But Humes goal in that text is precisely to dispute the inference from the theatrical metaphor that the mind, like the theater, must be a unified place, and that the self must thereby precede and center the constant flow impressions that, in Humes view, in fact constitute it: There is properly no simplicity in it at one time, nor identity in different; whatever natural propension we may have to imagine that simplicity and identity. The comparison with the theater must not mislead us. They are the successive perceptions only, that constitute the mind; nor have we the most distant notion of the place, where these scenes are represented, or of the materials, of which it is composd.50 It is not surprising that Deleuze would cite this passage in his early book on Hume, going on to gloss, the place is not different from what takes place in it; the representation does not take place in a subject.51 It is important to note, however, that the question of whether a subject in any sense precedes or is constituted by a flux of impressions is entirely independent from the essential aspect of the theatrical metaphor, namely, that those impressions are not taken to be complete on their own but rather stand in for

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something not present, and somehow inaccessible. Furthermore, if the coherence of a subject over time is indeed merely the product of associations, as Hume argues, Hume already intuits in his great work the extent to which the inaccessibility of others impressions is vital to the organization and deployment of that seeming coherence. In his analysis of how the sense of self over time is produced by the association of impressions, Hume reduces the essence of that coherence to what he calls the principle of resemblance between an image and its object, where the image refers to the traces of our memory, a faculty, by which we raise up the images of past perceptions.52 Insofar as multiple similar perceptions occur successively, the fact that these images must resemble their object makes the whole seem like the continuance of one object.... In this particular, Hume concludes, the memory not only discovers the identity, but also contributes to its production, by producing the relation of resemblance among the perceptions.53 What is most fascinating in this analysis, however, is how the idea of object permanence can only be supported by the same kind of fantasy projection we have already seen operating in Hume. The principle of resemblance between remembered images and the objects they represent works to produce both the identity of the object and the identity of the observer and, as he insists, the case is the same whether we consider ourselves or others; however, the entire thought experiment is prefaced by this conditional: suppose we coud see clearly into the breast of another, and observe that succession of perceptions, which constitutes his mind or thinking principle.54 Why does Hume need to posit this counterfactual prior to arguing for the centrality of resemblance in the production of identity? Precisely because the principle he is defending is no more accessible than the experience of that other whose mind the thought experiment seeks to explain. In both cases what is instrumental in producing temporal coherence or synthesizing impressions over time is our inability to see into the others breast, as well as the very horizon that inability raises separating our experience of the object from how it is in itself or, which is the same thing, how it might be perceived by a being who is not limited in the ways we are. What is an impression? An image, an infinitely thin sliver of time? An affection of the body, Deleuze says, and then defines the mind with Hume as the assemblage of these impressions. The assumption does away with the need for something, another faculty, to connect two disparate moments: association ... is a rule of the imagination and a manifestation of its free exercise.55 Kant will also make association a rule of the imagination, but will add that its free exercise is only part of the imagination (spontaneity);56 the imagination also synthesizes disparate impressions under the unity of the concept, and it is this operation that renders any kind of experience possible.57 In fact, inspired precisely by the challenge of Humes empiricism, Kant will stipulate the dependence of the synthesis of experience over time on the opposition of two content-independent fulcra, an object = X underlying all possible objects of cognition and the subject of apperception unifying the various subjective impressions.58 My experience of the world is filtered through the existential fact that I cannot experience it as others do, a fundamental question that implicates my own desires and affective life with the question of others

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The theater, much like print, cinema, or the digital image in their own ways, becomes a fundamental mediumnot merely a way in which humans communicate, but a fundamental form of human embodiment.

desires. For if the impressions that are thus unified are mine, that is only the case insofar as those of another do not belong to me.59 Then again the question may be, Deleuze writes after rejecting the theatrical model of the subject, how does the mind become a subject?60 The mind becomes a subject by incorporating the other. It does this by representing the other with a signifier, and representing itself with a signifier for another signifier, all of which permits, indeed forces the question of whether my perceptions correspond to what in fact is there, that is, whether my clear and distinct ideas can be extended to the world. Thus does Humes comparison of the theatre become entirely apropos: the comparison of theater becomes a way of figuring this divide of the other in us; it is the way, in the early modern context, that the mind becomes a subject. The idea of the theater is apt not because it implies an exterior space for the assemblage of images, but because of the institutional division it engenders between bodies and the characters they portray. Theatricality becomes one, powerful and yet historically specific, version of the epistemological privilege, and the theater, much like print, cinema, or the digital image in their own ways, becomes a fundamental mediumnot merely a way in which humans communicate, but a fundamental form of human embodiment.61 Thus when Adrian Johnston emphasizes the second-order nature of affective life, such that in some sense feelings are always the feelings of feelings, we can see the implications of this notion of fundamental mediation for affective life.62 I only feel my feelings insofar as they are already to a minimum degree other to me, an otherness that constitutes them as my feelings at the same time as it constitutes me as the one who feels them. None of which is to say that I am not a body first and foremost, or that my conscious existence is not subtended and supported by an unconscious of the body that far exceeds it, as Deleuze puts it. Rather, it is to insist that the fundamental mediating apparatus of subjectivity thoroughly co-implicates with affective experience, and that the theatrical divide Deleuzian affect theory and its philosophical forebears seek to overcome remains an ineradicable element of the very experience to which they turn in the hopes of doing so. >> As we have seen, a great appeal of Deleuzian affect theory has been its promise of a kind of short circuit between experience and bodies that bypasses subjectivity and its attendant limitations63the ego, ethnocentrism, gender bias, the list goes ontouching on an implicit ethical dividend, insofar as subjective capture seems counterproductive to real engagement with otherness in almost any form. But as weve also seen, the same

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early modern attempts to ground ethics in experience that so influenced Deleuze reveal in striking detail how the limits of subjectivity cleave to the problem of ethics at its very core. In fact, not only does it seem impossible to link the transmission of affect to an ethical project without the mediation of subjectivity, subjectivity and its inherent autoalienation may well be intrinsic to affective experience. At its best, the turn to affect has reminded theorists of communication in all its forms, from the political to the psychological to the literary, that when humans communicate they do so through their bodies, and that the affective dimension of this embodied communication often exceeds the grasp and dominion of cognitive processes. But as often occurs with intellectual trends, the enthusiasts of affect have at times overstated their case, asserting a promise for their theoretical endeavors that not only exceeds their possibilities, but also undermines the very real pertinence of neurological studies of affect to vital questions in philosophy, psychology, and the study of literature, art, and culture. It behooves us, in the end, not to consider affect as an opponent to subjectivity, but instead to understand how deeply related the two are. I feel, therefore I am,64 wrote the Cuban novelist and theorist Alejo Carpentier in the context of his El recurso del mtodo (Recourse of Method), a novel whose rationale from the title onward is a parody and response to Cartesian thought; to which one can only note how even this most basic expression of the primordial kinship between feeing and being seems sutured, at its core, to that solitary vowel that marks the subjects feeling minimal exclusion from the surrounding world.

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Notes
Id like to thank Ling Hon Lam for inviting me to deliver a paper in the Space of Emotion workshop at Wellesley College, and James Noggle for his insightful response to that earlier version of this paper. 1 To note titles briey and very selectively, some of which I will deal with in greater depth below: two collections, Clough and Halley, The Affective Turn and Neuman et al., The Affect Effect; Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience; Terada, Feeling in Theory; and Massumi, Parables for the Virtual. Two of my colleagues at Johns Hopkins, Ruth Leys and William Connolly, have recently engaged in a debate in the pages of Critical Inquiry around the question of the turn to affect. Much of the debate turns on the extent to which the thinkers Leys criticizes share a mistaken commitment to the idea of a presumed separation between the affect system on the one hand and signication or meaning or intention on the other, as Leys puts it in her reply to Connolly (Affect and Intention, 800). In what follows I also reassert the dimension of signication, intention, and specically subjectivity as inextricably entwined with affect, although I also nd evidence for support of this position in at least some of the thinkers Leys most overtly criticizes. 2 See, for example, Sedgwick and Frank, Shame and Its Sisters, and Sedgwick, Touching Feeling. 3 This genealogy is also traced by Gregg and Seigworth in their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, 5. 4 I should also note that plenty of scholars have avoided the Deleuzian vocabulary for very similar reasons to those I discuss in this essay. Katrin Pahl, for example, writes about emotionality instead, claiming that, to use affect in the sense dened by Deleuze and Guattari, that is, as non-conscious and nonlinguistic experience of intensity, appears not to be useful if one wants to explore the overlap of rationality and emotionality, as well as insist on the textual and self-reexivethat is, self-augmenting and selfattenuatingcharacter of emotionality (Emotionality, 549). 5 6 7 8 9 Clough, Introduction to The Affective Turn, 12. Hardt, Forward to The Affective Turn, ix. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 4. Ibid., 2. Ibid.

10 Massumi references Simondon, Lindividu et sa gense physico-biologique and Lindividuation psychique et collective for these arguments. It is important to note that neither Simondons work nor the deployment of his concepts necessitates the conceptual leap I am tracing in Massumis argument. Mark Hansen, to cite one example, has effectively adopted Simondons vocabulary for the purposes of a new phenomenology of images in the digital age: Simondon has expanded this conception by treating affectionor what he prefers to call affectivityas the mode of sensation that opens embodied experience to that which does not conform to already contracted bodily habits. It does so, Simondon claims, because it mediates between the domain of the individual (i.e. whatever comprises the already individuated human organism) and the domain of the preindividual that comprises the domain of metastability conditioning all processes of individuation (Hansen, Affect as Medium, 207). 11 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 35; emphasis in the original. 12 The same is true of the ostensible potential of affect theorists to skirt meaning even while, we presume, writing meaningfully about it. For Kathleen Stewart, affects work not through meanings per se, but rather in the way that they pick up density and texture as they move through bodies, dreams, dramas, and social worldings of all kinds. Their signicance lies in the intensities they build and in what thoughts and feelings they make possible. The question they

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beg is not what they might mean in an order of representations, or whether they are good or bad in an overarching scheme of things, but where they might go and what potential modes of knowing, relating, and attending to things are already somehow present in them in a state of potentiality and resonance (Ordinary Affects, 3). 13 Clough, Introduction to The Affective Turn,2. Again, the use of the concepts of affect theory need not promote such dichotomies. In another essay Hansen uses the conceptual apparatus of affect theory to explore, as he calls it, the apparent paradox of contemporary subjectivity: the fact that technical expansion of self-affection allows for a fuller and more intense experience of subjectivity, that, in short, technology allows for a closer relationship to ourselves, for a more intimate experience of the very vitality that forms the core of our being, our constitutive incompleteness, our mortal nitude (The Time of Affect, 589). 14 Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 36. I should be clear that I nd nothing inherently wrong with this move, as long as it is acknowledged and framed accordingly. For instance, Jane Bennett, in a seminal article in the journal Political Theory, focuses her attention on what she terms the recalcitrance or moment of vitality in things in order to give voice to a less specically human kind of materiality, to make manifest what I call thing-power. She goes on to specify, I do so in order to explore the possibility that attentiveness to (nonhuman) things and their powers can have a laudable effect on humans. (I am not utterly uninterested in humans.) In particular, might, as Thoreau suggested, sensitivity to thing-power induce a stronger ecological sense? (The Force of Things, 348). Bennett adopts the language of human agency and experience in discussing the realm traditionally known as inanimate precisely so as to trouble settled distinctions of human/nonhuman and living/nonliving that unconsciously determine attitudes and behavior toward the environment.

15 The choice of mammal derives, obviously, from Thomas Nagels inuential essay. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? 16 Dennett, Whos On First? Heterophenomenology Explained. 17 Williams, Affective Processes without a Subject, 246. 18 Ibid., 256. Quotations may be found in A Spinoza Reader, 129 and 168 respectively. 19 Descartes, Meditations on First Philosophy, 2526. 20 Ibid., 47. 21 22 23 24 25 Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 159. Ibid., 161. Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader, 72. Ibid., 73. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy, 165.

26 Deleuze, Spinoza, 1819; emphasis in the original. 27 28 Ibid., 20. Ibid., 23.

29 In Teradas suggestive formulation: Spinoza sets about explaining how adequate ideas could come to exist by building a kind of ladder out of the distinctions between affections and feeling affects, between kinds of feeling affects, and between all affects and adequate ideas. Affect is heuristically important because it faces both in and out, and therefore clinches the univocity of expression (Feeling in Theory, 11718). 30 Ibid, 119. 31 Pappas, Scent of a Womans Tears Lowers Mens Desire.

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32 Damasio identies mirror neurons with his own as-if-body-loop, the process by which the brain simulates certain emotional body states internally (Looking for Spinoza, 115). 33 In addition to Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, see his Descartes Error, The Feeling of What Happens, and Self Comes to Mind. See also LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, and Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience. 34 Damasio, Looking for Spinoza, 12.

40 Ekman, Emotions Revealed. 41 LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 114.

42 Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, 84. 43 All three notions, however, that of a motive, of an interest, and of a maxim, can be applied only to nite beings. For they all suppose a limitation of the nature of the being, in that the subjective character of his choice does not itself agree with the objective law of a practical reason; they suppose that the being requires to be impelled to action by something, because an internal obstacle imposes itself. Therefore they cannot be applied to the Divine will (Kant, Critique of Practical Reason, 100). 44 45 46 Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 319. Lacan, crits, 694. Ibid., 693.

35 At the same time, Damasio ventures that core consciousness and some level of emotion are directly correlated (The Feeling of What Happens, 100). 36 For precisely this reason no facile distinction can be drawn between contemporary neuroscience and those philosophers and theorists who defend a stronger role for rationality and intentionality in emotional life, such as Martha Nussbaum and Robert Solomon. See Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, and Solomon, Not Passions Slave. 37 Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 147. To avoid reinventing the wheel, suffice it to say that after a few decades of shifting debates between what could be generally called judgment theories of emotions and affect theories, the former emphasizing the role of cognition in generating emotional responses and the latter their bodily or affective dimensions, many reasonable voices seem to be settling on some version of this position. Jenefer Robinson, for example, criticizes judgment theory but offers a new model that emphasizes the arousal of emotions as a multi-step (albeit very fast) process, beginning with a noncognitive affective appraisal but overlaying that almost immediately with cognitive evaluations (Deeper than Reason, 41). 38 Johnston, The Misfeeling of What Happens,91. 39 LeDoux, The Emotional Brain, 11213.

47 This argument is advanced in my How the World Became a Stage. 48 49 Egginton, How the World Became a Stage, 124. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 301.

50 Ibid. 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 308. Ibid. Ibid. Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 24. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 257. Ibid, 249. E.g., ibid., 233, 251.

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Works Cited
59 This is why Sartre was driven to incorporate the gaze of the other so centrally in his own phenomenological system: my apprehension of the Other in the world as probably being a man refers to my permanent possibility of being-seen-by-him; that is to the permanent possibility that a subject who sees me may be substitutes for the object seen by me (Sartre, Being and Nothingness, 345). The inuence on Lacans whimsical illustration of the gaze in his famous anecdote of Petit-Jean is clear: the sherman points to a sardine can oating in the water and to his great amusement asks the young and somewhat less amused Lacan, You see that can? Do you see it? Well, it doesnt see you! (Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, 95). 60 Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity, 23; emphasis in the original. 61 See Wegenstein, Getting Under the Skin, esp. chapter 4, The Medium is the Body. Hansen also emphasizes the irreducibility, as well as the privilege, of bodily mediation in the experience of time as self-affection (subjectivity) (The Time of Affect, 590). He makes this point in the context of a reading of Bernard Stieglers notion, inspired by Derrida, that technological mediation is already functional at the most basic levels of subjective experience. See Stiegler, Derrida and Technology. 62 Johnston, Affekt, Gefhl, Empndung, 257. Bennett, Jane. The Force of Things: Steps toward an Ecology of Matter. Political Theory 32, no. 3 (2004): 34772. Carpentier, Alejo. El recurso del mtodo. Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno Editores, 1974. Clough, Patricia Ticineto, with Jean Halley. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Connolly, William E. The Complexity of Intention. Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 79198. Damasio, Antonio R. Descartes Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Putnam, 1994. . The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999. . Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain. Orlando: Harcourt, 2003. . Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the Conscious Brain. New York: Pantheon, 2010. Deleuze, Gilles. Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Humes Theory of Human Nature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1991. . Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. New York: Zone Books, 1990. . Spinoza: Practical Philosophy. San Francisco: City Lights, 1988. Dennett, Daniel. Whos On First? Heterophenomenology Explained. Journal of Consciousness Studies 10, nos. 910 (2003): 1930. Descartes, Ren. Meditations on First Philosophy. 3rd ed. Translated by Donald A. Cress. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. Egginton, William. How the World Became a Stage: Presence, Theatricality, and the Question of Modernity. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003.

63 To choose one of many passages: A radical empiricism, if it is to be a thorough thinking of relation, must nd ways of directly, affectively joining the infraempirical to the superempirical (Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 16). 64 Carpentier, El recurso del mtodo, 309.

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Ekman, Paul. Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life. 2nd ed. New York: Holt, 2007. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 2010. Hansen, Mark B. N. Affect as Medium, or the Digital-Facial-Image. Journal of Visual Culture 2, no. 2 (2003): 20528. . The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life. Critical Inquiry 30, no. 3 (2004): 584626. Hardt, Michael. Forward: What Affects Are Good For. In Clough and Halley, The Affective Turn, ixxiii. Hume, David. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by Tom L. Beauchamp. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. . A Treatise of Human Nature. New York: Penguin, 1985. Johnston, Adrian. Affekt, Gefhl, Empndung: Rereading Freud on the Question of Unconscious Affects. Qui Parle 18, no. 2 (2010): 24989. . The Misfeeling of What Happens: Slavoj iek, Antonio Damasio and a Materialist Account of Affects. Subjectivity 3, no. 1 (2010): 76100. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Practical Reason. Translated by T. K. Abbot. Amherst, NY: Prometheus, 1996. . Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Lacan, Jacques. crits: The First Complete Edition in English. Translated by Bruce Fink. New York: Norton 2006. . The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho analysis. New York: Norton, 1981.

LeDoux, Joseph E. The Emotional Brain: The Mysterious Underpinnings of Emotional Life. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. Leys, Ruth. Affect and Intention: A Reply to William E. Connolly. Critical Inquiry 37, no. 4 (2011): 799805. . The Turn to Affect: A Critique. Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 43472. Massumi, Brian. The Autonomy of Affect. Cultural Critique, no. 31 (1995): 83109. . Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham: Duke University Press, 2002. Nagel, Thomas. What Is It Like to Be a Bat? Philosophical Review 83, no. 4 (1974): 43550. Neuman, W. Russell et al., eds. The Affect Effect: Dynamics of Emotion in Political Thinking and Behavior. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Nussbaum, Martha C. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Pahl, Katrin. Emotionality: A Brief Introduction. MLN 124, no. 3 (2009): 54754. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Pappas, Stephanie. Scent of a Womans Tears Lowers Mens Desire. Live Science. January 6, 2011. http:// www.livescience.com/9212-scent-woman-tearslowers-men-desire.html. Robinson, Jenefer. Deeper than Reason: Emotion and Its Role in Literature, Music and Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Being and Nothingness: An Essay on Phenomenological Ontology. New York: Philosophical Library, 1956.

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Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2003. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, and Adam Frank, eds. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995. Simondon, Gilbert. Lindividu et sa gense physicobiologique. Paris: P.U.F., 1964. . Lindividuation psychique et collective. Paris: Aubier, 1989. Solomon, Robert C.Not Passions Slave: Emotions and Choice. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Spinoza, Benedictus de. A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works. Translated and edited by E. M. Curley. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994. Stewart, Kathleen. Ordinary Affects. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007. Stiegler, Bernard. Derrida and Technology: Fidelity at the Limits of Deconstruction and the Prosthesis of Faith. In Jacques Derrida and the Humanities: A Critical Reader, edited by Tom Cohen, 23870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Terada, Rei. Feeling in Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001. Wegenstein, Bernadette. Getting under the Skin: The Body and Media Theory. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Williams, Caroline. Affective Processes without a Subject: Rethinking the Relation between Subjectivity and Affect with Spinoza. Subjectivity 3, no. 3 (2010): 24562.