Affect, Emotion, and Rhetorical Persuasion in Mass Communication

Lei Zhang, Carlton Clark

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351242356
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This volume examines the interplay between affect theory and rhetorical persuasion in mass communication. The essays collected here draw connections between affect theory, rhetorical studies, mass communication theory, cultural studies, political science, sociology, and a host of other disciplines. Contributions from a wide range of scholars feature theoretical overviews and critical perspectives on the movement commonly referred to as "the affective turn" as well as case studies. Critical investigations of the rhetorical strategies behind the 2016 United States presidential election, public health and antiterrorism mass media campaigns, television commercials, and the digital spread of fake news, among other issues, will prove to be both timely and of enduring value. This book will be of use to advanced undergraduates, graduate students, and active researchers in communication, rhetoric, political science, social psychology, sociology, and cultural studies.

Part I

Theorizing Affect and/or Emotion

1 Three Affect Paradigms

The Historical Landscape of Emotional Inquiry

Kevin Marinelli

Perhaps no concept of human inquiry currently generates more excitement than that of affect. From rhetoric to cultural studies to affective neuroscience, a growing number of scholars investigate the ineffable energy of human activity identified as affect. The trend presents both opportunities and challenges. On one hand, the burgeoning study of affect offers a potential node of interdisciplinary collaboration. On the other hand, its heterogeneity can also undermine a coherent framework of analysis. Various scholarly communities apply the term in different contexts with different inflections. Scholars consequently wind up talking past one another despite their common interests and collaborative potential. Our challenge, then, is to facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue while also preserving the richness of our respective traditions. We certainly do not want to become dogmatic in our vocabulary or homogenize our perspectives for the sake of clarity, but we should at least remain cognizant of how different academic circles define our common terminology. Only then will we begin to craft a multidimensional theory of affect utilizing the numerous insights at our disposal.

This chapter provides an introduction to affect theory by surveying its three dominant paradigms: classical rhetoric (affect as pathos); cultural studies (affect as extra-discursive energy); and neuroscience (affect as precognitive emotion). The topology does not connote a rigid structure of affect scholarship so much as highlight dominant themes of discussion. Its purpose is to illuminate the range of seminal projects defining affect studies while focusing on their common roots and points of departure. By engaging the evolution of affect studies in this way, we may begin to transform multidisciplinary interest into interdisciplinary conversation. The chapter moves spatially and chronologically across the disciplines from classical antiquity to present day. First, we engage Aristotle’s concept of pathos in classical rhetoric. Second, we trace the evolution of affect in cultural studies from the rationalist philosophy of Benedict de Spinoza through the post-structural insights of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. Third, we trace the development of affect studies in the life sciences from the evolutionary biology of Charles Darwin through the affective neuroscience of Paul Ekman and others. Finally, we touch upon notable intersections of affect scholarship whose multimodal perspectives offer unique insights into the human condition. First, a word on the challenge set before us.

The concept of affect, much like the phenomenon it identifies, remains notoriously difficult to manage. Scholars generally describe affect as the ineffable dimension of human activity. Some use it to describe a facet of human emotion, while others situate it in discourse and culture. In either case, affect generally refers to human activity operating outside the parameters of traditionally perceived “reason.” Beyond that, there exists little consensus on the topic. We find as many definitions of affect as there are people studying it.¹ In that way, the concept functions more as a theoretical placeholder than a clearly defined phenomenon. Affect appears to us much like dark matter appears to theoretical physicists: overwhelming evidence suggests it exists, but no one agrees on what exactly “it” is. Biologists, for example, find evidence of affect in the human flashes of rage or fear that sometimes exceed our conscious judgment of a situation. Cultural theorists find evidence in discursive formations whose rhetorical life often exceeds the intentionality of its participants. This chapter attempts to situate these seemingly disparate perspectives in an ongoing conversation beginning in classical antiquity with the emergence of rhetorical studies.

Affect in Classical Rhetoric

Modern theories of affect evolve from classical insights concerning human motivation in public affairs.² Emotion becomes an important topic of discussion with the proliferation of public oratory in the fifth century BCE. Scholars quickly recognize the capacity of orators to stir and manipulate emotional states in their audiences for personal gain. The philosophy of Plato, for example, articulates a critical response to what he perceives as the “non-rational” dimension of rhetoric.³ To clarify his position, Plato assigns three components to the soul: reason, emotion, and desire (we will return to the concept of desire in the next section).⁴ The topology marks a perceived dichotomy between emotion and reason that persists today.⁵ Still, perhaps in light of his disdain for it, Plato offers considerably minimal insight on the phenomenon of emotion itself. We locate some of the earliest sophisticated treatment on emotion in the work of his successor, Aristotle.⁶

Aristotle engages emotion most extensively in Book II of the Rhetoric. Emotion is defined as desire accompanied by a particular form of pleasure or pain facilitated by situational premises.⁷ Specifically, Aristotle engages the rhetorical production of emotion, which he identifies as pathos. According to Aristotle, “The emotions [pathê] are those things through which, by undergoing change, people come to differ in their judgments and which are accompanied by pain and pleasure, for example, anger, pity, fear, and other such things and their opposites.”⁸ We may likewise define pathos as a rhetorically generated emotion aimed to induce audience judgment. The emphasis on judgment is essential for Aristotle to rescue rhetoric from the caricature of emotional manipulation circulating in Plato’s Academy at the time.⁹ By connecting emotion to human reason in the form of pathos, Aristotle effectively legitimizes the practice of rhetoric in general and the study of emotion in particular. In other words, because pathos is rooted in reason, it is not necessarily bad. Thus, for the first time, emotional rhetoric becomes aligned with reasoned deliberation.

Aristotle’s reasonable treatment of emotion offers a wealth of psychological insight. Specifically, it reveals an emotional logic philosophers had previously ignored. In turn, thinkers could now consider emotion in the context of rational decision-making. In the same gesture, however, Aristotle effectively narrows the scope of emotional rhetoric by situating it squarely in logical premises.¹⁰ The nonrational generation of emotion, by contrast, located in rhetorical devices such as physical delivery, receive no vindication in the Rhetoric.¹¹ Likewise, scholarly interest in emotion becomes relatively confined to conscious judgment and beliefs, while emotional activity exceeding perceived reason remains marginalized.¹² Thus, even as emotion earns a place within the rhetorical canon, it nevertheless remains subservient to the more dignified form of rational deliberation.¹³ For centuries to follow, rhetoricians interested in emotion focus primarily on pathos while minimizing the potential affectivity of extra-discursive emotional appeals.¹⁴ Accordingly, phenomena such as physicality and tonality (identified today as modes of affect) are effectively excluded from the purview of rhetorical criticism.¹⁵

Aristotle expands his insights on emotion in the Nicomachean Ethics. Here, emotion functions not merely as a conduit of public judgment but also, and more importantly, as an ancillary of human virtue. Like his predecessor, Aristotle situates emotion within a topology of the soul. For Aristotle, however, the soul comprises feelings, capacities, and states. The framework, in turn, provides a more nuanced perspective on the interaction between reason and emotion.¹⁶ The two need not necessarily oppose one another as Plato had argued. Instead, emotion can serve as a valuable aid in the pursuit of reason. Aristotle defines the three categories as follows. First, a feeling refers to “whatever implies pleasure or pain.”¹⁷ Second, a capacity is “what we have when we are said to be capable of these feelings.”¹⁸ Finally, a state refers to our quality of being when experiencing such feelings.¹⁹ To feel good about doing good things implies a positive state, whereas feeling bad about doing good things implies a negative state. Likewise, virtue is a state of being connected to a feeling or emotion.²⁰

In the construction of human virtue, Aristotle argues, individuals must cultivate the appropriate emotional disposition toward acting appropriately. Put simply, one must strive to feel good about doing good. In this way, emotion becomes a central facet of ethical life. Additionally, one must cultivate an emotional disposition autonomously, free from the manipulation of others. Virtue can be cultivated, e.g., nurtured in children by parents and teachers, but it cannot be manipulated, e.g., rhetorically generated by orators or emotional events.²¹ The rhetorical generation of pity, for example, marks a negative, and likewise, unintentional emotion.²² Accordingly, to help someone out of pity fails to constitute human action because it hinges on an involuntary reflex rather than reasoned deliberation.²³ Because it fails to constitute human action, it fails to constitute ethical behavior, since only humans are capable of such behavior. In this way, Aristotle’s treatment of emotion in the Ethics and the Rhetoric operate similarly. Each model values emotion only insofar as it coordinates with reason. Aristotle transforms Plato’s binary between reason and emotion into a binary between reasoned and unreasoned emotion. In doing so, Aristotle articulates but refrains from engaging the dimension of emotional activity identified today as affect.

The Aristotelian conception of emotion informs a considerable portion of emotion studies in philosophy and the social sciences still today. Even as more and more scholars emphasize the importance of emotion in public life, reason remains paramount. Moral philosopher Martha Nussbaum, arguably the leading advocate of Aristotelian ethics, aims to demonstrate the cognitive mediation of human emotion, i.e., emotions as judgments, in her political philosophy.²⁴ While Nussbaum does amend features of Aristotle’s philosophy in light of contemporary scientific insights, she nevertheless privileges a theory of emotional cognition over the concept of affect to which we turn next.

Affect in Cultural Studies

The contemporary study of affect complements the Aristotelian emphasis on reasoned deliberation by examining the ineffable side of emotional life. The scholarship typically falls within either cultural studies or affective neuroscience. In cultural studies, scholars draw on a myriad of theorists, including David Hume, William James, Henri Bergson, Sigmund Freud, and Jacques Lacan. Its primary foundation centers on the work of seventeenth-century philosopher, Benedict de Spinoza.²⁵ In this section, I ground the critical-cultural approach to affect in the work of Spinoza and his twentieth-century admirers, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari.

We find the centerpiece of Spinoza’s work on affect in his magnum opus, the Ethics. The work provides some of the most profound insights into human motivation since Aristotle. Aristotle provides a major influence on Spinozan philosophy, and their perspectives share significant parallels.²⁶ Both consider the ethical utility of bodily affection. Spinoza, for example, communicates the ethical centrality of affect by devoting the third and central part of his treatise to the concept. Both aim to collapse dominant binaries between reason and emotion. Both privilege reason, but nevertheless surpass their contemporaries concerning their insights on the bodily mediation of human activity. Both argue only positive emotions accompany reason. Additionally, Spinoza’s definition of affect as the potential to increase or diminish one’s “power of acting” echoes Aristotle’s concept concerning the “capacity” of the soul to feel appropriately.²⁷ Still, Spinoza also distinguishes himself from Aristotle by delving further into the psyche of human motivation. In doing so, Spinoza effectively redefines common terms s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• List of Editors
• Introduction: Heartfelt Reasoning, or Why Facts and Good Reasons Are Not Enough
• Part I Theorizing Affect and/or Emotion
• Part II Affect in Rhetorical and Cultural Theory
• Part III Affect in the Mass Media
• Part IV Affect in 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
• Index