The Ascent of Affect

Genealogy and Critique

Ruth Leys

• Verlag: University of Chicago Press
• Jahr: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226488738
• Thema: Biological Sciences
• Thema: Science General

In recent years, emotions have become a major, vibrant topic of research not merely in the biological and psychological sciences but throughout a wide swath of the humanities and social sciences as well. Yet, surprisingly, there is still no consensus on their basic nature or workings.Ruth Leys's brilliant, much anticipated history, therefore, is a story of controversy and disagreement. The Ascent of Affect focuses on the post–World War II period, when interest in emotions as an object of study began to revive. Leys analyzes the ongoing debate over how to understand emotions, paying particular attention to the continual conflict between camps that argue for the intentionality or meaning of emotions but have trouble explaining their presence in non-human animals and those that argue for the universality of emotions but struggle when the question turns to meaning. Addressing the work of key figures from across the spectrum, considering the potentially misleading appeal of neuroscience for those working in the humanities, and bringing her story fully up to date by taking in the latest debates, Leys presents here the most thorough analysis available of how we have tried to think about how we feel.

[ CHAPTER ONE ]

SILVAN S. TOMKINS’S AFFECT THEORY

Cognition without affect is weak; affect without cognition is blind.

—Silvan S. Tomkins, 19811

The last text Foucault published before his death had at its center the concept of life. In his teacher Georges Canguilhem’s greatest book, Le Normal et Le Pathologique (The Normal and the Pathological, [1943] 1966), Foucault suggested, the problem of the specificity of life found itself inflected in the direction of certain crucial problems:

At the center of these problems is that of error. For at life’s most basic level, the play of code and decoding leaves room for a kind of chance that, before being disease, deficit or monstrosity, is something like a perturbation in the information system, something like a “mistake.” At the limit, we might say that life—and this is its radical character—is what is capable of error. And perhaps we have to ask whether it is because of this given, or rather this fundamental eventuality, that the question of anomaly pervades the whole of biology. Of this eventuality also we have to ask for the explanation of mutations and the evolutionary processes they induce. Equally this eventuality must be interrogated about this unique yet hereditary error which produces in man a living being who never feels completely in his place, a living being who is destined “to err” and “to be deceived” . . . [Canguilhem], himself so “rationalist,” is a philosopher of error: I mean to say that it is in starting from error that he poses philosophical problems, more exactly, the problem of truth and life . . . Does not the entire theory of the subject have to be reformulated once knowledge, instead of opening onto the truth of the world, is rooted in the “errors” of life?2

The philosopher Giorgio Agamben has recently stressed what he sees as the anti-intentionalist implications of Foucault’s remarks by observing that

[W]hat is at issue here is . . . something like a new experience that necessitates a general reformulation of the relations between truth and the subject and that, nevertheless, concerns the specific area of Foucault’s research. Tearing the subject from the terrain of the cogito and consciousness, this experience roots it in life. But insofar as this life is essentially errancy, it exceeds the lived experiences and intentionality of phenomenology . . . What is the nature of a knowledge that has as its correlate no longer the opening to a world and to truth, but only to life and its errancy? . . . It is clear that what is at issue in Foucault is not simply an epistemological adjustment but, rather, another dislocation of the theory of knowledge, one that opens onto entirely unexplored terrain.3

Foucault’s impressive discussion of Canguilhem, along with Agamben’s comments, can serve as a frame for my analysis of a moment in the history of the human sciences when the idea of life’s essential errancy informed an explicitly anti-intentionalist account of the affects. My goal in this chapter is to analyze the emergence in the United States in the post–World War II period of a new anti-intentionalist paradigm of the affects based on the role of error. That new paradigm eventually displaced alternative ways of thinking about the emotions. Indeed, its success has been so great that today it informs the work not only of the majority of neuroscientists and psychologists but also, increasingly, that of literary critics and political theorists. (There is also a reaction against it—we shall see.)

My story begins in the early 1960s, when the American psychologist Silvan S. Tomkins (1911–1991) published a new theory of the affects in two volumes of what would become a massive four-volume study of the emotions.4 It was not his first publication on the topic. He had already sketched his ideas in an essay in French in a volume edited by the French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan.5 But Tomkins’s orientation was radically different from that of psychoanalysis. His work was strongly marked instead by the new science of cybernetics, which in the 1960s was exerting a powerful metadisciplinary influence. Many postwar researchers in America were also looking for ways to bring purpose or teleology back into the psychological sciences, from which it had been banished by the behaviorist movement. Cybernetics was attractive in this context because it seemed to suggest that intentionality could be theorized, in effect recast, using strictly mechanical assumptions. (At roughly the same moment, Canguilhem was following analogous trends by redescribing genetic mutation and genetic transmission in terms borrowed from information theory.)6

A trio of influential thinkers, Arturo Rosenblueth, Norbert Wiener, and Julian Bigelow, had put forward the crucial arguments for such a view in a famous article of 1943. There they had proposed that all purposive animal behaviors could be regarded as “servo-mechanisms” requiring negative feedback; the model was that of a mechanical device, such as a thermostat, operating on the feedback principle.7 For Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow, there were no significant qualitative differences between living organisms and machines in this regard. In spite of some sharp philosophical criticisms, Rosenblueth, Wiener, and Bigelow’s claims were widely embraced.8 In a book titled Plans and the Structure of Behavior (1960), which everyone in American psychology was reading in the early 1960s, George A. Miller, Eugene Galanter, and Karl Pribram—all leading figures in the field—claimed that the “cybernetic hypothesis” or feedback loop was the fundamental building-block of the nervous system, and that the living organism could be conceptualized as a set of hierarchically organized “plans” or “programs.” They asserted that in this way intentionality, even unconscious intentionality, could be brought back into the human sciences without stirring up the ghosts of nineteenth- or twentieth-century vitalisms of the kind associated with the work of Hans Dreisch, Henri Bergson, Walter M. Elsasser, and others.9

Tomkins was among those who were influenced by these cybernetic developments. But in a conference he organized in 1962 on the “Computer Simulation of Personality,” he rightly observed that one critical factor was missing from existing proposals to simulate mechanically the behavior of living organisms, especially human beings. What was lacking was any discussion of the role of motivation—especially the role of emotions. As he put it: “The automaton must be motivated.”10 The trouble, Tomkins went on to assert, was that philosophers and psychologists from Plato to Freud had gotten motivation wrong. This was because they had subordinated the affects to the drives. Tomkins invited his audience to consider the need for air. It might seem that a momentary interruption of the air supply immediately creates an urgent need to gasp for breath. But Tomkins argued that what is primarily observed in the response to air deprivation is not the drive for air, but the rapidly mounting emotional panic that amplifies the drive signal. That the drive signal itself is not necessarily strong or insistent unless appropriately amplified by emotion could be seen, he suggested, when pilots in World War II suffered a gradual loss of air at 35,000 feet but refused to wear their oxygen masks. Rather than panic, they experienced the euphoria that accompanies slow anoxic deprivation. As Tomkins reported, “some of these men died with a smile on their lips” (CSP, 13).

Tomkins therefore suggested that the drives and the affects are two completely separate systems, and that it is the affects, rather than the drives, that constitute the primary motives. Moreover, he declared that what makes the affect system different from the drive system, and what gives it its motivating power, is above all the fact that, unlike the drive system, which is inherently oriented to the objects that satisfy it, the affect system is only contingently connected to its triggering events, which indeed it may fail to identify correctly. In short, according to Tomkins, the affect system operates blindly and is marked by a tendency to error. Tomkins argued as follows.11 He said that the drives are too narrowly constrained in their aims, time relations, and above all their objects to make them a suitable basis for human motivation, which requires a much higher degree of flexibility or freedom. As literary critic Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has stated in endorsing Tomkins’s position, “only a tiny subset of gases satisfy my need to breathe or of liquids my need to drink.”12 Tomkins believed this objection applied to the sexual drive as well. For anyone familiar with the work of psychoanalysts Jean Laplanche and J.-B. Pontalis, who argued that for Freud desire has extraordinary freedom with respect to objects precisely because it has no predetermined objects of its own, it may come as a surprise to learn from Tomkins that sexuality is constrained in its object orientation in much the same way that hunger is.13 Nevertheless, for Tomkins what makes even the sexual drive an inadequate basis for human motivation is a trait it shares with the other drives, its immediate instrumentality, its “defining orientation toward a specified aim and end different from itself” (TF, 19).

Tomkins thought the affect system does not have this instrumental character. As he stated in his reflections on the requirements for constructing a human automaton (or what he called a “humanomaton”):

There must be built into such a machine a number of responses which have self-rewarding and self-punishing characteristics. This means that these responses are inherently acceptable or inherently unacceptable. These are essentially aesthetic characteristics of the affective responses—and in one sense no further reducible. Just as the experience of redness could not be further described to a color-blind man, so the particular qualities of excitement, joy, fear, sadness, shame, and anger cannot be further described if one is missing the necessary effector and receptor apparatus . . . [I]t is . . . the phenomenological quality which, we are urging, has intrinsic rewarding or punishing characteristics. If and when the humanomaton learns English, we would require a spontaneous reaction to joy or excitement of the sort “I like this,” and to fear and shame and distress, “Whatever this is, I don’t care for it.” We cannot define this quality in terms of the instrumental behavioral responses to it, since it is the gap between these responses and instrumental responses which is necessary if the affective response is to function like a human motivational response. There must be introduced into the machine a critical gap between the conditions which instigate the self-rewarding or self-punishing responses, which maintain them, which turn them off, and the “knowledge” of these conditions, and the further response to the knowledge of these conditions. The machine initially would know only that it liked some of its own responses and disliked some of its own responses but not that they might be turned on, or off, and not how to turn them on, or off, or up, or down in intensity. (CSP, 18–19)

It is because of sexual desire’s instrumental character—because like the other drives it is structured by lack and oriented toward an aim and object different from itself—that Tomkins demoted the role of sexuality in human motivation (and here he broke with Freud).

In contrast to the drives, Tomkins held that affects have far greater freedom with respect to objects. In a statement that mixes direct quotation and commentary, Sedgwick has observed in this connection:

“[A]ny affect may have any ‘object.’ This is the basic source of complexity of human motivation and behavior.” The object of affects such as anger, enjoyment, excitement, or shame is not proper to the affects in the same way that air is the object proper to respiration. “There is literally no kind of object which has not historically been linked to one or other of the affects” . . . Affects can be, and are, attached to things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions, and any number of other things, including other affects. Thus, one can be excited by anger, disgusted by shame, or surprised by joy. (TF, 19)

But in what I think is a questionable move, Tomkins then went on to argue that because the emotions are not tied to any one object but can be contingently attached to a vast range of objects, they are intrinsically independent of all objects. He therefore claimed that the multiplicity of objects of the affects means that the emotions are in principle objectless, and hence can be satisfied without the means-end logic of the drives. I consider this a mistake: it does not follow that because the affects can have a multiplicity—even a vast multiplicity—of objects, they are inherently without any relation to objects whatsoever. The mistake, in other words, is thinking that having multiple objects undoes objectality altogether. Put another way, for Tomkins the affects are non-intentional states.

Now, the idea that one or other of the emotions can be discharged in a self-rewarding or self-punishing fashion independently of any object whatsoever implies that the way to understand joy or anger or sadness is to say that these affects are elicited or activated by what we call the object, but the object is nothing more than a stimulus or trip wire for an inbuilt behavioral-physiological response. We might put it that in this account the object of the emotion is turned into the “trigger” of the reaction, with the result that the response is purged of instrumentality. Tomkins adopted such a trigger theory of the emotions. In his words:

If the affects are our primary motives, what are they and where are they? Affects are sets of muscle, vascular, and glandular responses located in the face and also widely distributed through the body, which generate sensory feedback which is inherently either “acceptable” or “unacceptable.” These organized sets of responses are triggered at subcortical centers where specific “programs” for each distinct affect are stored. These programs are innately endowed and have been genetically inherited. They are capable, when activated, of simultaneously capturing such widely distributed organs as the face, the heart, and the endocrines and imposing on them a specific pattern of correlated responses. One does not learn to be afraid or to cry or to be startled, any more than one learns to feel pain or to gasp for air . . . If we are happy when we smile and sad when we cry, why are we reluctant to agree that smiling or crying is primarily what it means to be happy or sad?14

This passage brings out Tomkins’s commitment to the idea that there exists a limited number of discrete emotions defined as pan-cultural or universal, inherited, and adaptive responses of the organism, an idea that in Tomkins’s cybernetic-inspired model treats the emotions as distinct affect “programs” or “assemblies,” which can and do combine in “central assemblies” with the purposive-cognitive and other systems, but from which they are in principle independent. As hardwired, reflex-like, subcortical, and hence noncognitive, species-typical genetic programs, behaviors, and physiological reactions, the affects have activators or triggers that are innate and hence independent of learning, although they can also be stimulated by the learned activators of memory, imagination, and thinking (AIC, vol. 1–2, 248). At first Tomkins thought there were eight different primary affects, but he later decided there were nine.15 In short, according to him the emotions are “natural kinds,” that is to say, categories that correspond to real divisions in nature.

Tomkins thus proposed a noncognitive, or non-intentionalist, account of the affects. What are the general implications of his account? What is interesting about his theory is the way it makes it a delusion to say you are happy because your child got a job, or sad because your mother died, for the simple reason that your child’s getting a job, or your mother’s death, is only a trigger for your happiness or sadness, emotions that could in principle be triggered by something else. In other words, Tomkins held that the affects are inherently objectless, because they are bodily responses, like a sneeze or an orgasm or an itch: I laugh when I am tickled, but I am not laughing at you (at anything).16 As Donald Nathanson, a leading follower of Tomkins, recently declared in this regard, the affects “are completely free of inherent meaning or association to their triggering source. There is nothing about sobbing to tell us anything about the steady-state stimulus that has triggered it; sobbing itself has nothing to do with hunger or cold or loneliness. Only the fact that we grow up with an increasing experience of sobbing lets us form some idea about its meaning.”17

For Tomkins, therefore, the paradigm of the affects is the miserable newborn baby who cries without knowing why or what can be done about it. For him, free-floating distress or anxiety of the kind one might attribute to the wailing infant is a paradigm of the affects just because it is free floating and hence can be experienced without relation to an object or to cognition. Although we may search to provide the anxiety with an object, there is no object to which it inherently belongs. For Freud, free-floating anxiety is only apparently free from the object, because the latter is not absent, only unconscious repressed. For Tomkins, the anxiety really is free, and the attribution to it of an object always a potential illusion. The point for him was not to define the affects in terms of cognitively apprehended objects but as intentionless states. As I observed in the introduction, emotion theorist Paul Griffiths has likewise pointed to the existence of so-called “objectless” emotions, such as forms of depression, elation, and anxiety, as evidence in support of Tomkins’s idea that certain basic or primary emotions are undetermined by beliefs.18 So, my ability to give a reason for my feeling something must be a mistake, because what I feel is just a matter of my physiological condition. This is a core materialist claim, and Tomkins’s emotion theory is therefore a materialist theory that displaces or suspends considerations of intentionality or meaning in order to produce an account of the affects as inherently corporeal in nature.

A striking aspect of Tomkins’s theory in this regard is that it introduced a radical ...

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• [ INTRODUCTION ]
• [ CHAPTER ONE ]
• [ CHAPTER TWO ]
• [ CHAPTER THREE ]
• [ CHAPTER FOUR ]
• [ CHAPTER FIVE ]
• [ CHAPTER SIX ]
• [ CHAPTER SEVEN ]
• [ EPILOGUE ]
• Acknowledgments
• [ APPENDIX 1 ]
• [ APPENDIX 2 ]
• Footnotes
• Index