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Book Title The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism Series Title Chapter Title The Turn to Affect: Emotions Without Subjects, Causality Without Demonstrable Cause Copyright Year 2017 Copyright HolderName The Author(s) Corresponding Author Family Name Sha Particle Given Name Richard C. Prefix Suffix Division Organization American University Address Washington, USA Email [email protected]

Abstract Probing the theoretical implications of claims, championed by Brian Massumi and Patricia Clough, that affect is physiological and pre-subjective, this chapter argues that if the personal history that comes with emotion is subsumed into affects so construed, then the subject is twice removed: once in the stripping down of emotion to affect; and again in the shift in political and social analysis from consensus to contagion. A turn to affect that entails a turn away from conventional rationality risks leaving behind concepts like the human, the subject, and agency, and so put at risk the ability to define the social and affect in ways that enable them to do meaningful work. Having effects is not quite the same as being efficacious, for ubiquitous effects threaten to make them inconsequential by mystifying causality. To address this danger, the chapter proposes a theory of affect that at least gives it the possibility of recognizing the value of further cognitive processing. Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 1/19

1 CHAPTER 9 Author Proof

2 The Turn to Affect: Emotions Without

3 Subjects, Causality Without Demonstrable

4 Cause

5 Richard C. Sha

6 Because affect is physiological and pre-subjective, affect, as championed by AQ1 7 Brian Massumi and Patricia Clough, would appear to amount to an engage- 8 ment with emotions without rational subjects. If the personal history that 9 comes with emotion is subsumed into affects, which impose their own rela- 10 tionality (a kind of sociality), then the subject is twice removed: once in the 11 stripping down of emotion to affect; and again in the shift from consensus to 12 contagion. As I will argue below, the loss of this personal history is quite sig- 13 nificant. Yet what underwrites affect, other than a physiology that somehow 14 does its work between bodies? Although Clough and Massumi repeatedly 15 tie affects to the autonomic system which is located within bodies but below 1 2 16 the threshold of consciousness, affect, we are told, works between bodies. 17 Moreover, since such affect is transmitted by contagion, or by what Massumi 3 18 calls bodily immediation, the transmission is immediate, thereby once again

Jan Plamper in The History of Emotions: An Introduction, trans. Keith Tribe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) argues that emotions should be the umbrella term covering the gamut from affect through feelings and passions to emotions. I agree. For generous and helpful readings of drafts of this chapter, I am especially indebted to Marshall Alcorn and to my colleague, April Shelford. A round of thanks as well is due to Donald Wehrs and Thomas Blake for their incisive editorial suggestions.

A1 R.C. ShaUNCORRECTED (*) PROOF A2 American University, Washington, USA A3 e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2017 1 D.R. Wehrs and T. Blake (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of Affect Studies and Textual Criticism, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-63303-9_9 Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 2/19

2 R.C. Sha

4 19 severely limiting rationality. Under affect, the agent is the body, and thinking 20 is redefined as “the co-motion of relational encounter” (PA 104–105, 210). 21 I question the degree to which a turn to affect must entail a turn away 22 from conventional rationality because I worry that the exhaustion in the

Author Proof 23 humanities from the linguistic turn, which both preceded the turn to affect 24 and left behind concepts like the human, the subject, and agency, is blind- 25 ing affect theorists to our hunger for efficacy as well as to the costs of the 5 26 kind of efficacy they advocate. One significant cost is the reduction of the 27 social to bodies always already charged by affect, for within this definition of 28 the social, how does the social or affect do any meaningful work, especially 29 if it is always there and always presumed to have effects? Having effects is 30 not quite the same as being efficacious. Ubiquitous effects threaten both to 31 make them inconsequential, and to mystify causality as it becomes unclear 32 how any particular cause can be isolated. If entities are entirely resolved into 33 unstable matrices of effects, then there are no entities to represent, in which 34 case causality is mere rhetoric and not something open to objective interpre- 6 35 tation. When Spinoza defined the affects in terms of their effects—Massumi 36 paraphrases this as the “capacity for affecting or being affected” (PA 3)—he 37 granted affect an efficacy and an automatic arc from feeling to action. In this 38 view, affect loosens the straightjacket of subjectivity, allowing for modulations 7 39 that are assumed to be a kind of agency. I want, by contrast, a theory of 40 affect that at least gives it the possibility of recognizing the value of further 41 cognitive processing. 42 In “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Ruth Leys argues that affect runs 43 the danger of creating a model in which the automating of our emotions 44 into affect programs dispenses, in our account of affect, with anything like a 8 45 subject. Her main worry is that influential strands within the current study 46 of emotion separate emotion from intention and meaning, making emotion 47 and cognition separate systems. I share this worry. Leys doubts if the locus of 48 affective processing is in the autonomic system, which is below the threshold 9 49 of consciousness : for her, the emotions have cognitive dimensions that affect 10 50 programs such as Massumi-style theorizing postulates would suppress. 51 According to Paul Griffiths, affect programs are “the coordinated set of 11 52 changes that constitute the emotional response.” Yet Griffiths doubts there 53 are “actual neural structures which can be regarded as programs controlling 12 54 the emotional response.” The dispensing of the subject is peddled within 55 the humanities academic marketplace on the basis that subjects are belated 56 and that affects get to them in formation. Affect thereby acquires the agency 57 to transmit itself immediately and seamlessly through porous social bodies. 58 In this view, the ability to distance oneself becomes “a luxury” (Massumi PA 59 93), and thisUNCORRECTED sets up a need to replace ideological analysis withPROOF affect because 60 affect is how ideology does its work. Massumi even goes so far as to grant 61 affect autonomy: “affect is autonomous to the degree to which it escapes Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 3/19

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62 confinement in the particular body whose vitality, or potential for interaction, 63 it is” (PV 35). 64 But what is bodily affective autonomy, and why should we want it? Mas- 65 sumi writes: “Actually existing, structured things live in and through that

Author Proof 66 which escapes them. Their autonomy is the autonomy of affect” (PV 35). 67 In this view, autonomy is associated with what escapes bodies. However, 68 since autonomy conventionally refers to self-government, Massumi’s auton- 69 omy is a paradoxical one, for the thing that escapes the body is the source 70 of its agency. If the affects thereby become autonomous, it is neither clear 71 what benefits result from this autonomy, nor what the autonomous entity is. 72 He adds, “there is no such thing as autonomy in the sense of being entirely 73 affectively separate” (PA 40), insisting, “it’s a fiction that there is any posi- 74 tion within society that enables you to maintain yourself a separate entity with 75 complete control over your decisions—the idea of a free agent that somehow 76 stands back from it all and chooses, like from a smorgasbord platter” (PA 40). 77 He concludes, “when I act I am more of a catalyst for the reactivation of … 78 certain constraints and forces that are embedded in a relational field …. Our 79 freedom is how we play our implication in the field” (PA 158). Since auton- 80 omy has been reduced to our implication in the field, how is that implication 81 to be recognized and understood? 82 Of course, the “subject” has been under assault for some time now, in part 83 because its agency relies upon a false binary opposition between subjects and 84 objects that no doubt inflates its agency, and in part because of growing rec- 85 ognition of how important the emotions are to our decision making. With 86 the fall of the subject comes the rise of the object, and the turn to thinking 87 about the body’s agency. Massumi’s turn to the body’s agency helps us to 88 accept our “implication in the field” as our agency, but only to make agency 89 paradoxical as a kind of self-government, but with a porous self that by defini- 90 tion cannot govern itself. Furthermore, rationality has also taken a beating, 13 91 but should we content ourselves with affective cognition? Behavioral econo- 92 mists such as Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely warn that our decisions are 93 never as rational as we might think they are. Ariely submits that we are pre- 14 94 dictably irrational. Kahneman argues that we are driven by two systems: a 95 fast intuitive and emotional one predisposed to belief contrasted by a slower 15 96 logical one that undoes belief. But does this skepticism warrant jettisoning 97 rationality altogether? We would do well to remember that bad reasoning is 98 not an argument against rationality. Ariely and Kahneman, it should be said, 99 highlight the common errors we make in our decision making so that we can 100 make better decisions, and Ariely’s emphasis on the predictable means that 101 even our irrationality can be partly rationally understood. While Massumi may 102 be rightUNCORRECTED that the free agent is a fiction, it may be anPROOF enabling fiction. And 103 while it gives a politics and autonomy to the affects, the alternative he posits 104 may also be a fiction in that it allows us to have our cake—autonomy—and 105 eat it, too, because in this view, I argue, our autonomy is our sociality. Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 4/19

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106 Here, I press the costs of thinking about the emotions without subjects. 107 What follows, then, amounts to a critique of Massumi’s and Clough’s meta- 108 theory of affect, which is advanced by a contrast to David Hume and Adam 109 Smith. I do so by comparing the current turn to affect with the Enlighten-

Author Proof 110 ment model of emotional spectatorship because it argues that the rational 111 subject needs distance from affect in order to have agency over it. While 112 I concede that affects can work immediately, I resist models of affect that 113 prevent the very possibility of reflexive distance even when this distance can 114 only be available retroactively. Nor do I think the subject is as sheddable as 115 affect theorists believe. Thomas Dixon has shown how the eighteenth cen- 116 tury secularized the passions into the emotions with the development of the 117 discipline of psychology, thus making the emotions components of the indi- 16 118 vidual subject. This means that the subject has a long and complex history. 119 Although Hume was skeptical of personal identity, he framed it as a gram- 17 120 mar and not as a philosophical difficulty. He claims, “identity depends on 18 121 the relations of ideas; and these relations produce identity.” In other words, 122 Hume conceded the self’s unity to be a fiction but nonetheless recognized its 123 structuring power to deliver a vantage point from which to perceive kinds of 124 relationality, while also providing said distance. Understanding the self and 125 rationality as fiction does not necessarily get rid of them. Moreover, this very 126 fictionality becomes a resource insofar as it provides a way of bracketing a 127 position so that it can be examined. Finally, in giving up the subject, current 128 affect theory that follows Massumi and Clough disregards the ability to use 129 one’s personal experiences as a particular kind of knowledge.

130 Affects Without Subjects and Contagion 131 as the Engine of the Social

132 To advance my critique of Massumi and Clough, I must first try to exam- 133 ine the costs of their claims. Let me start by admitting that there are some 134 good reasons to lose faith in the subject. Certainly, its hierarchical relation to 135 objects has been a major problem: subjects instrumentalize objects and in so 136 doing enact their subject status. Teresa Brennan notes that the idea of a self- 19 137 contained individual is a fantasy. Lacan has been influential in his argument 20 138 that subjects are structured by a lack. And by making emotions the compo- 139 nents of a subjectivity, one makes it more difficult to change one’s relations 140 to one’s emotions, because doing so becomes tantamount to giving up one’s 141 identity. 142 Nonetheless, I wonder if the current insistence upon the porousness of the 143 subject is an alternative fantasy that enables affect to be the key to all mythol- 144 ogies behindUNCORRECTED agency and power not only because it allows PROOF affect to saturate 145 and supplement the subject, but also because this porousness both assumes 146 and grounds the mobility and circulation of affect. Let’s grant that sub- 147 jects are more porous that they were once thought to be. However, without Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 5/19

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148 closure, the subject simply becomes the environment. The tendency to equate 149 the affects with aliveness helps reinforce this equivalence, as aliveness often 150 suggests an openness to the environment and capacity to adapt. Who lives in 21 151 this condition of absolute porousness? Affect theorists say that we all do.

Author Proof 152 On one level, with porousness, what happens to membranes within bodies 153 that offer some control over the border between inside and out? On another 154 level, this flattening of the subject and her surround disables the distance that 155 conventionally underwrites reflection. When Massumi equates affect with 156 “intensity” and assumes that intensity is a “nonconscious, never-to-be con- 157 scious autonomic remainder … spreading over the generalized body surface 158 like a lateral backwash” (PV 25), he simultaneously flattens affect and makes 159 it impervious to consciousness and so to rational deliberation. Yet because 160 “matter of factness dampens intensity” (PV 25), the rational here threatens 161 to extinguish affect. Three issues arise. If matter of factness threatens affect, 162 then it can be a resource to be exploited for a more deliberate affect. And 163 who is to say that deliberation itself cannot be an affect? One might further 164 argue that intensity has something to do with qualia, individual examples of 165 conscious subjective experiences, and under that view, would be the backdrop 166 for conscious analysis. 167 In The Affective Turn, Patricia Clough defines the body in terms of 168 “a historically specific organization of forces” (16), and this move prepares 169 the way for affect as a force to work its magic. She adds, “but there is some- 170 thing else, something about a sociality of a system, a nervous system, that 171 pulls us to complexity, to turbulence, to far-from-equilibrium conditions— 172 pulling us to critically engage the sinister side of the system, as well as its 173 potential for freedom” (28). The subject here is the “subject of trauma,” 174 which becomes “more like an assemblage of body memories and pre-indi- 175 vidual affective capacities” (9). In the name of the subject, the subject has 176 become an assemblage. I note that “historically specific” functions as an amu- 177 let to magical thinking, offering a current sign of self-consciousness just at 178 the moment when disbelief most needs to be suspended. She then theorizes 179 the body as a network of information and technology, which she notes is 180 assembled “in terms of open systems under far-from-equilibrium conditions 181 of metastability” (18). Once again the deck is being stacked: systems not 182 in equilibrium are especially vulnerable to change, and if that were not bad 183 enough, the system is vulnerable to “metastability.” Metastability presupposes 184 a dynamical system whereby the entity does not exist in its lowest energy state 185 for long stints of time. Indeed, Clough explicitly writes against a theory of 186 autopoesis that “takes disturbances to the organism’s equilibrium and home- 187 ostasis as destructive” (11), instead choosing a “Deleuzian biophilosophy” 188 that insistsUNCORRECTED that the organism is open to information PROOF (12). While the body 189 may be an open and dynamic system, the reference to energy within metasta- 190 bility indicates clear limits and costs to this openness, and for better or worse, 191 homeostasis is a means of regulating energy expenditure. Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 6/19

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192 Clough’s framing of the body in terms of dynamic forces is even more 193 worrisome given that her definition of the social virtually replicates her defini- 194 tion of bodies. To the extent that the body and the social are both charged by 195 affect, how does affect make a meaningful difference? In the previous exam-

Author Proof 196 ple, body and system are elided, even as the “nervous system” becomes about 197 “sociality.” Another way of framing this objection: where does the social 198 as system, and where does the body as system, begin and end? The radical 199 openness of her system means that the one simply shades into the other, and 200 without a difference between body and sociality, how does one prove any par- 201 ticular causality? She suggests that the turn to affect registers “the challenges 202 of ongoing war, trauma, torture, massacre, and counter/terrorism” (1). 203 These events, in turn, suggest that the affective turn registers “ongoing polit- 204 ical, economic, and cultural transformations” that are tantamount to “the 205 social” (1). On the one hand, the body is represented as a site of dynamic 206 forces. On the other hand, the social registers these forces. In this view, body 207 slides into the social even as the affects become simultaneously agents, causes, 208 and effects. This is to assume that bodies and sociality share the same cur- 209 rency. Indeed, Clough insists both suffer trauma, and this registers itself by 210 compulsive repetitions that are analogous to the Freudian Death Drive (8). 211 Although she continually claims this reframing as a “rethinking,” my worry 212 is that this rethinking merely reverses what we previously thought. My suspi- 22 213 cion is that this reversal has allowed affect to acquire the power of dogma. 214 Trauma has become so useful to affect theory because its unchallenged effi- 215 cacy indelibly marks all subjects and even the concept of the subject itself. 216 In a similar vein, Brian Massumi has defined the affects in terms of move- 217 ments and understands movement as simultaneous sensation and movement 218 in space (PV 1). More recently, Massumi has insisted that affect is all about 219 processes like the dynamic encounter between feeling and thinking. This 220 insistence upon process moves affect in the direction of efficacy since it con- 221 tributes to processes that help make the subject. Process already begins the 222 slippery slope of efficacy, insofar as the action is already underway. Massumi 223 continues, “the concept of affect, as taken up in a philosophy of immedia- 224 tion, is a way of focusing on the germinal modes of activity that factor into 225 events as they are just beginning, and are not yet fully determined as to where 226 they might lead. It’s a directly relational concept, because you have to think 227 of ‘to affect’ and ‘to be affected’ as two sides of the same coin of the event” 228 (PA 151). Here, affect is taken for granted as comprising two modes of activ- 229 ity. What began as process has now become the incipient event, and we are 230 directed to look at affect in terms of both sides of the event: the affecting and 23 231 affected parts of it. Massumi argues, “in my own work I use the concept 232 of ‘affect’ asUNCORRECTED a way of talking about that margin of maneuverability” PROOF (3). In 24 233 this view, affect is the site of agency, occupying the space of potentiality. In 234 fairness to Massumi, he concedes that affect “is not automatic” and that it is 235 “protopolitical” (ix). Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 7/19

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236 Nonetheless, Massumi again collapses affect with effects when he insists 237 that “affect is like our human gravitational field, and what we call freedom is 238 its relational flips. Freedom is not about breaking or escaping constraints. It’s 239 about flipping them over into degrees of freedom” (17). Agency is telescoped

Author Proof 240 into “relational flips,” and because affect is like a gravitational field, it is una- 25 241 voidable. In the end, “protopolitical” orients affect toward the teleology of 242 the political even when it has not yet arrived at a politics. And affect is defined 243 in terms of the difference it makes, which is to assume that it makes meaning- 244 ful differences. 245 So too does affect become the infrastructure of the social, and as it does, it 26 246 removes the possibility of shared rationality. As Massumi argues, “in affect 247 we are never alone. That’s because affects, in Spinoza’s definition, are basi- 248 cally ways of connecting, to others and to other situations” (PA 6). Perhaps, 249 the potential for connectivity is always there. However, we cannot always 250 remain open to this connectivity: the boundary or membrane between self 251 and environment is sometimes necessary, and to have agency, the self must be 252 marked off from its environment. Massumi insists: “there’s no vantage point 253 from which you could encompass it all, there’s no shared perspective from 254 which to find a common language or build a consensus or share a rational- 27 255 ity. The situation is constitutively dissensual” (PA 69). What affect and the 256 social amounts to then are a connectivity among differences, or “an ecology 257 of symbiotic practices” (PA 70). In this view, the social has become an ecol- 258 ogy without rationality. When he claims that “taking complexity for a starting 259 point, broadly speaking, is what ‘ecological’ means” (PA 70), I highlight that 260 in making ecology the necessary form of complexity, its blindnesses can no 261 longer be registered. Within ecology, the cogito is replaced by systems, but 262 what drives the system? “Constitutively dissensual” further frames dissent as 263 the only possible outcome, but can an ecology be based on dissent, and with- 264 out borders, how is this dissent even possible? By linking affect with constitu- 265 tive dissent, moreover, Massumi can put the affects on the side of a resistance 266 to capitalism even as the differences made by the ecology can be claimed by 267 the self’s affects. 268 Massumi elaborates further. Not only is affect pre-subjective, but it is also 269 “transindividual” (PA 94), once again celebrating porousness. “Affective 270 thinking-feeling is transindividual in two senses. First, … it pertains directly 271 to what is passing between individuals involved, which is irreducible to nei- 272 ther taken separately. And second, … it coincides with a becoming of the 273 involved individuals” (PA 94). Affect here is automatically social, and it is also 274 the agency of the social, as it leads to the becoming of individuals together, 275 but remains “irreducible” to them. Irreducibility allows the theory dogmatic 276 ambiguityUNCORRECTED and thus enables it to avoid objective interpretation. PROOF If this transin- 277 dividuality provides some index of contagion, moreover, I note that Massumi 278 argues that “our bodies and our lives are almost a kind of resonating chamber Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 8/19

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279 for media-borne perturbations that strike us and run through us” (PA 114), 280 an experience he calls “immediation.” 281 Affect theory has made valuable contributions to the rethinking of many 282 concepts like the subject, and in proposing questions of scale, it asks at what

Author Proof 283 level of analysis should we begin work. I am nonetheless skeptical that all 284 these conditions pertain to it, and I remain wary of a porous subjectivity that 28 285 not only has no container for itself, but also no use for one. Affect com- 286 pels because it simultaneously functions both as a metonymy for agency and 287 for the social, and it specifies the agent on the way to becoming a subject, 288 but a porous subject always open to the collective or to immediation. This 289 porous virtual subject further underwrites a body subject to absolute contin- 290 gency with the exception of the contingency of having a particular body. That 291 is, it offers a contingency without the contingency of any particular body, 292 which is to say a contingency without a price. In the names of virtuality and 293 contingency, then, it gets rid of the necessary particularity that comes with 294 particular embodiment and elides the fact that particular bodies do not have 29 295 available to them equally all forms of virtuality. The homology between 296 affect as subject and affect as the social further enables affect to become 297 simultaneously both cause and effect, and thus the key to all mythologies. 298 As Bruno Latour submits, “the social seems to be diluted everywhere and 30 299 yet nowhere in particular.” By extension, the same must be true for affect, 300 which, like contagion, is everywhere and is the engine for everything. It has 301 become nothing less than efficacy writ large. 302 I now turn my attention to how affect theory understands contagion to 303 think about how this further leaves behind the rational subject, and deliber- 304 ately so. Teresa Brennan is one of very few scholars to consider how exactly 305 contagion does its work, and for that reason merits close attention. She 306 argues affect is transmitted via either pheromones, chemical entities which 307 we uptake unconsciously through smell, or a kind of rhythmic entrainment 308 whereby our individual rhythms synchronize with larger environmental oscil- 309 lations such as diurnal cycles. Building upon this idea, she seeks to develop a 310 new paradigm for agency, one that takes into account “intentional and affec- 311 tive connections between and among subjects and their environment” (78). 312 In so doing, she moves intention down to the hormonal level, and as a result 31 313 “no direct physical contact is necessary for transmission to take place” (69). 314 While I find her critique of intentionality helpful and want to think about 315 what her reduction of scale means, I question her tendency to insist, “the 316 affect in the room is a profoundly social thing” (68). That is, I tense the pro- 317 fundity of the social against the reduction of subjects to affects. I also suggest 318 that the contagion model heightens its disruptive powers precisely by making 319 the subject UNCORRECTEDancillary. In this view, the cogito is too belated PROOF and enslaved to 32 320 affective forces. Brennan does however acknowledge that “the transmission 321 of … affects can be resisted, provided they are discerned” (23). Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 9/19

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322 I must concede that both Massumi and Clough define affects in terms of 323 marked “intensification of self-reflexivity” (Clough 3), but even this is defined 324 in terms of “systems” or “processes turning back on themselves to act on 325 themselves” (3). Just how deliberative is this folding in on itself? And when

Author Proof 326 self and system become interchangeable, what happens to our concepts of 327 agency? To the extent that this turning back becomes an automatic part of a 328 system, what happens to its powers of reflexivity? What is the “it” doing the 329 reflecting? The metonymy between affects and systems allows the affects to 330 become more and more encompassing, and in the slide from the one to the 331 other, their impacts also scale upward.

332 Passions with Subjects and Looking 333 as the Means to the Social

334 Our current turn to affects in the discourse of the humanities makes Adam 335 Smith and David Hume strange reading. Both Smith and Hume assume 336 that the passions are always objects of spectatorship, objects to be looked at 33 337 from the vantage of the self and society. Smith even suggests that society is 338 a mirror of the self. This emphasis on spectatorship serves to make the pas- 339 sions objects subject to both personal and public approval or disapproval, 340 and it also places the rational subject at the center of an emotional economy. 341 Emotions thereby acquire a necessary looked-at-ness, and it is this distance 342 between the emotion/passion and the subject that offers a vantage point 343 from which rational control, the subject, and a common point of view are 344 possible. This maneuver was deemed necessary because Smith especially took 345 for granted the possibility of self-interestedness. He acknowledged, moreo- 346 ver, that the imagination could not duplicate the intensity of the emotions 347 of others. Smith would insist that only the “sentiments of cool and impartial 34 348 spectator[s]” can provide a reliable standard for judgment. Because of this 349 potential for personal bias, the sentiments had to have possible correctives 350 put in place, and with those correctives, sentiment could provide a founda- 351 tion for morality. From the perspective provided by Hume and Smith, affect 352 theory appears to wish away the self and with it personal bias and self-inter- 353 est. And where Hume and Smith distinguish between sentiments and moral 354 sentiments, sentiments that have a kind of normative force because they are 355 the products of reflection, affect theory tends to recognize only one level of 356 affect. 357 Now, in a move that anticipates affect theory, Hume does think that the 358 minds of men are subject to a kind of contagion. He writes, “as in strings 359 equally wound up, the motion of one communicates itself to the rest; so 35 360 all the UNCORRECTEDaffections readily pass from one person to another.”PROOF Despite his 361 acknowledgement of contagion, Hume nonetheless insists that we are free to 362 deliberate on the degree to which we are affected, and on what we are going 363 to do as a result, because moral sentiments are open to public viewing and Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 10/19

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36 364 to introspection. When he treats the causes of the violent passions in his 365 A Treatise on Human Nature, he further develops this distinction. Although 366 Hume insists that the passions are “agitations,” he argues that “tis evident 367 passions influence not the will in proportion to their violence, or the disor-

Author Proof 368 der they occasion in the temper; but on the contrary, that when a passion 369 becomes a settled principle of action, and is a predominant inclination of the 37 370 soul, it commonly produces no longer any sensible agitation.” Passions in 371 this view become moral when they develop into “settled principles of action,” 372 and what distracts us from their rationality is that they are “settled” by habit, 373 thus becoming “predominant inclinations of the soul.” Habit here relies 374 upon principles of action that through a kind of deliberate repetition and 375 gradual process of sedimentation become natural inclinations that nonetheless 376 can be redirected. Habits, after all, can be changed. 377 Christine Korsgaard captures Hume’s law thusly: “strictly speaking, we do 378 not disapprove the action because it is vicious; instead it is vicious because 38 379 we disapprove it.” Here the inner feeling that guides our disapproval guar- 380 antees that we will regard certain actions as vicious. Such feeling is further 381 guaranteed by a general sensibility: “the quick sensibility, which, on this head, 382 is so universal among mankind, gives a philosopher sufficient assurance, that 383 one can never be considerably mistaken in framing the catalogue [of an indi- 39 384 vidual’s mental qualities].” This sensibility, however, must attune itself to 385 the regulative ideal of a “common point of view, from which they might 386 survey their object, and which might cause it to appear the same to all of 40 387 them.” 388 Hume discusses the difficulty of defining the passions and insists that “the 389 utmost we can pretend to is a description of them, by an enumeration of such 41 390 circumstances, as attend them.” My point here is that Hume’s empiricism 391 must instruct us on how to see, and on what to look for, and these instruc- 392 tions compromise the nature of experience. In this example, because it is dif- 393 ficult to define the passions, Hume dwells instead on the circumstances which 394 make them visible and which can be enumerated, and to do that the passions 395 need to be situated contextually, so that one understands the situations that 396 bring them into being. In this way, Hume does not allow the passions to 397 remain internalized as parts of a hidden self but rather defines them as behav- 398 iors that can be looked at. Hume adds, “no passion of another discovers itself 399 immediately to the mind. We are sensible of its causes or effects. From these 42 400 we infer the passions: And consequently, these give rise to our sympathy.” 401 Hume and Adam Smith have much in common. Like Hume, Smith insists 402 that “sympathy … does not arise so much from the view of the passion as 43 403 from that of the situation which excites it.” And because Smith values above 404 all the correspondenceUNCORRECTED of one person’s sentiments to another’s, PROOF the social 405 operates as a check on any one individual’s sentiments. Unfortunately, it does 406 so via propriety, and here Daniel Gross is surely right that propriety reeks 44 407 of social difference. Building upon this idea, he argues that the emotions Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 11/19

9 THE TURN TO AFFECT: EMOTIONS WITHOUT SUBJECTS, CAUSALITY … 11

408 themselves should be read not in terms of universality but rather in terms of 409 social difference. He argues, “instead of wondering perennially why it has 410 taken so long to extend the range of human compassion to women, to slaves, 411 to non-Europeans, to the poor, to the disabled, and so on, we would do bet-

Author Proof 412 ter to track the history of terms such as … compassion and see how they have 45 413 been mobilized for strategic purpose.” 414 All this is not to deny that Smith’s and Hume’s defenses of the rational 415 feeling subject should have some have influence today. Given that both 416 Smith and Hume argue for contextualization as a way to read the sentiments, 417 I do think that their approaches anticipate Gross’s insistence upon rhetori- 418 cal differences when thinking about emotions in ways that Gross does not 419 quite acknowledge. Including the situation may anticipate Gross’s rhetorical 420 analysis. Crucially, however, since they set up reflection as a corrective to self- 421 interest, there is at least the theoretical possibility that such social differences 422 can become the objects of reflection and criticism. For example, when oth- 423 ers blame us, Smith writes, “the supposed impartial spectator of our conduct 424 seems to give his opinion in our favour with fear and hesitation; when that of 425 all the real spectators, when that of all those with eyes and from whose sta- 46 426 tion he endeavours to consider it, is unanimously and violently against us.” 427 Two points need to be made here. First, Smith sees his “impartial spectator” 428 as a trope that is subject to the correction of others, which requires a shared 429 rationality. Second, Smith acknowledges the “station” of his real spectators, 430 suggesting that class and position can become factors of analysis. Paul Bloom 431 remarks that while many have bought into the argument that rationality is 47 432 impotent, that does not stop them from making rational arguments, and 48 433 this irony has also been partly lost on affect theorists. 434 The rational subject that Hume and Smith rely upon, moreover, will not 435 be undone by its emotions, and thus their ways of thinking may help us to 436 recover an epistemology of the subjective that is not automatically bankrupt. 437 Here, I draw upon an essay by Cheshire Calhoun that confronts the subjec- 438 tivity of the emotions, but argues that the fact that our emotions are highly 439 personal does not automatically bankrupt them by affiliating with them a sub- 440 jectivity that vitiates knowing. Quite the contrary: she insists that our bio- 441 graphical perspectives on emotion serve as a neglected resource when we are 442 aware of them. As she argues, “simply adopting a point of view and being 49 443 selectively attentive does not entail epistemic subjectivity.” Instead of auto- 444 matically saddling emotion with irrationality, one might begin to look for the 445 emotion’s biographical meaningfulness (116). Furthermore, she insists that 446 forms of knowledge that abstract themselves from daily life risk an “epis- 447 temic schizophrenia,” where there is no possible meeting between theory 448 and whatUNCORRECTED can be learned from our practical engagements PROOF in the world (112). 449 She concludes, “while getting impersonal evaluations right may require 450 bracketing our own lives, the only way to get personal evaluations right is 451 to adopt a biographically subjective viewpoint” (115). Finally, she highlights Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 12/19

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452 how differences between how we notice and how we remember produce 453 differences of evaluation that can be an additional resource for reflection 454 (113). Although our emotions are shaped by our personal histories and are 455 therefore subjective, we can account for our personal experiences, bracket

Author Proof 456 them so as to prevent narcissism, and alter our judgments accordingly. The 457 fact that our emotions have biographical components to them does not do 458 away with the need to have a subjective style of thinking that is rationally con- 459 sistent (120). In these important ways, epistemic subjectivity can be avoided 460 and the emotions can be a means to rationality instead of their obstacle. 461 If Calhoun offers us ways of embracing the subjective along with the pos- 462 sibility of knowledge, what are the implications of her work for affect theory? 463 What is the epistemology of affect? Affect theory often makes this question 464 difficult to answer. Because it defines affect as a kind of “bare activity,” it 465 aligns itself with ontology rather than epistemology. In so doing, it acquires a 466 universality that counters the subjectivity of knowledge but at the cost of los- 467 ing personal experiences as an epistemological resource. When affect becomes 468 the work of bodies, moreover, the question of epistemology must be a ques- 469 tion of what bodies can know. 470 Hume’s and Smith’s notions of the specularity of the passions, which 471 requires distance between subject and object, might additionally profit from 472 Sianne Ngai’s perceptive comment that it is feeling that provides the distanc- 473 ing. She argues for “the idea of a distance attained not from feeling, but by 50 474 feeling.” When distance is framed not as negation of feeling but rather as 475 being enabled by feeling, rationality and the passions need have no neces- 476 sary antagonism. Yet when affect is defined as “aliveness” (PV 36) and as an 477 “openness,” distance as feeling is neglected, and one begins to see that only 478 certain affects then count as affects. Affects that are deadening like depression 479 seem to have little place in all this aliveness; by distracting us from these dead- 480 ening affects, affect theory disincentivizes readers to find reasons to object to 481 its porousness. 482 Korsgaard, moreover, helps articulate the stakes of the subject, and also 483 of the ability to reflect upon one’s emotions. Reflection not only provides 484 a deliberative perspective so that we can see our desires and emotions as 51 485 “providing suggestions that we may take or leave,” but also provides the 486 very basis for the integrity of a self. As she puts it, without integrity, you are 487 “no longer able to think of yourself under the description under which you 488 value yourself and find your life to be worth living and your actions to be 489 worth undertaking. It is to be for all practical purposes dead or worse than 52 490 dead.” With affect theory, integrity no longer seems possible, and the feel- 491 ing of wholeness is replaced by a feeling of openness. Of course, another way 492 to see it is UNCORRECTEDthat this openness increases the scale of wholeness, PROOF and indeed, 493 the individual becomes subsumed into an ecology that must be impactful. In 494 this way, the fact that only our affects have autonomy does not have to be 495 reckoned with. Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 13/19

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496 I conclude this section by invoking Michael Frazer’s important book on 497 the sentiments, The Enlightenment of Sympathy. Like Ngai, Frazer tries to 498 make space for the rationality of feelings, and he does so by insisting that sen- 499 timentalists like Hume and Smith “see such forces as emotion and imagina- 53 Author Proof 500 tion as part of the process of moral and political reflection itself.” Reflection 501 is not limited to rationality; rather, emotion and imagination become parts 502 of reflection, and thus become additional resources beyond rationality to be 503 exploited. And they would need to be exploited, especially since Smith and 504 Hume recognized that our sympathies were biased and limited, and thus had 505 to have the possibility of correction, a possibility that current affect theory, in 54 506 its insistence upon immediacy and openness, downplays or even denies. The 507 specularity of the passions, then, makes them available to critical reflection, 508 which is something that affect theory might do more to account for. And 509 insofar as Frazer helps us to see how emotion and imagination can enhance 510 this reflection, he provides a way of breaking down the dualism of feeling 511 and thinking without doing away with rationality. One simply has to recog- 512 nize that reflection is not limited to rationality and that one can reflect upon 513 emotion.

514 Emotions with Subjects and with Social Emotions

515 The price, then, for getting in on the ground level of the building of the sub- 516 ject is that affects must be non-cognitive or proto-cognitive, and that reflex- 517 ive distance must be shunted aside. Moreover, I have suggested the ways in 518 which affect theory runs the danger of inflating social agency. Although our 519 bodies may be vulnerable to the forces of affect, our bodies are not com- 520 pletely permeable, and porousness may underwrite the efficacy of the affects. 521 I have also worried about how affect functions as the glue holding together 522 both bodies and the social, and, in this way, elides cause and effect to become 523 the explanation of all change. Of course, my return to the subject may simply 55 524 reproduce what Daniel Kahneman refers to as the “psychology of causality.” 525 By this, he means that as human beings we need to separate free will from 526 physical causality so that we can highlight our individual agency in the world. 527 Though “psychology of causality” makes no claims about the absolute reality 528 of this form of causality, it does indicate that at a psychological level, the idea 529 of a subject radically influences our sense of the world and our agency within 530 the world. Thus, while the agency of the subject may be a fiction, this fiction 531 may amount to our sense of agency, and if so, then, thinking about it as a fic- 532 tion does not do away with it. Indeed, if anything it makes it necessary. In 533 this section, I try to think beyond affective contagion because the ethics of 534 contagionUNCORRECTED seem to be impoverished. PROOF 535 The work of philosopher Margaret Gilbert may help us to find a more 536 meaningful way to think about social agency than the contagion that affect 537 offers. Gilbert tries to think about what it means to act together, and her Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 14/19

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538 criterion of social agency is blameworthiness. At the very least, her work is 539 instructive because it sets a bar for what counts as meaningful social commit- 540 ments. Within affect theory, by contrast, affects are always already social. To 541 delineate meaningful social commitments, Gilbert must first combat what she 56 Author Proof 542 calls the “singularist assumption about intentions.” This, in turn, mandates 543 thinking about what a collective epistemology looks like. Her claim empow- 544 ers us to distinguish between the free and coerced actions of groups. For our 545 purposes here, her defense of the possibility of collective emotions offers the 546 most practical importance. She speculates that collective emotions may not 547 require a specific phenomenology. Using guilt as her main example, she insists 548 that perhaps the cognition that one has done wrong is sufficient, and that 549 although “feeling-sensations” are typically concomitants of a cognition, they 57 550 do not have to be so. Gilbert’s suggestion, then, that judgment can vault 551 over affect and phenomenology, allows us to question the claimed efficacy 552 of affect. Her theory is that judgments do not always need to go through 553 the rigamarole of feeling the passions, and why expend this energy if judg- 554 ment allows us to get there without it? Hence her turn to joint commitments, 555 which must be explicitly expressed, and which cannot be rescinded by any 556 one individual in the group. One added benefit is that her model does not 557 require introspection, which runs the danger of being anti-social. 558 I have suggested here that our current turn to affect may tell us more 559 about the desire for agency than about how the emotions actually work. This 560 desire for agency is effectively masked by the reduction of scale associated 561 with it: subjects have been replaced by bodies, that in turn are subsumed by 562 affects. While the immediacy and “intensity” of the affects offers an exciting 563 dynamism and the constant possibility of change, the fact that the affects in 564 this model short- circuit rationality or make rationality belated suggests that 565 this immediacy may exact a high price. Furthermore, given that affect relies 566 upon a model of porous bodies always already beholden to the forces in the 567 environmental surround, for all intents and purposes, this model entails the 568 death of the subject. So we must calculate whether the risks of affect the- 569 ory are worth it. One final caution: affect theorists make affect virtually the 570 unfalsifiable cause of action. We are immersed in it and cannot avoid it. It 571 becomes part of the nature of experience and of the event. Let me let Mas- 572 sumi have the last word: “when I’m talking about affect I’m talking about 573 a directly relational immersion in a field of immi(a)nence from which deter- 574 mined actions and determinate thoughts have to emerge” (PA 116).

575 Notes 576 1. See PatriciaUNCORRECTED Ticineto Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective PROOF Turn: Theorizing 577 the Social, ed. Patricia Ticineto Clough (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 578 2007), 2. Further references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically 579 by page number in the text. Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 15/19

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580 2. One key debate with regard to affect is whether or not it is available to 581 consciousness. Eric R. Kandel argues that there are aspects of “unconscious 582 information processing [which] involve cognition and ha[ve] ready access to 583 consciousness” (The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in 584 Art, Mind, and Brain [New York: Random House, 2012], 471). Author Proof 585 3. Brian Massumi, Politics of Affect (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015), 114. All 586 further references are to this edition (henceforth PA) and will be cited by page 587 number parenthetically in the text. 588 4. Affect, according to Massumi, requires a different politics. Massumi thus 589 seeks a performative politics that “resists personification in peak individuals” 590 (PA 36). Affective modulation must be met with affective modulation, and the 591 best way to do that is a performative or theatrical approach to politics (PA 34). 592 5. To wit, Massumi develops his model precisely to refute the idea of body as dis- 593 course. See his Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, 594 NC: Duke University, 2002), 1–2, henceforth identified as PV and cited par- 595 enthetically by page number in the text. Indeed, Massumi insists that affect 596 is “asignifying,” thereby overturning the linguistic turn (PV 27). He rejects 597 the characterization of an affective turn that is different from a linguistic turn 598 because it assumes that “affect is a thing, something which can be separated 599 from other things” (PA 150). If affect is inseparable from other things, it 600 becomes a version of Newton’s aether. 601 6. Massumi discusses affect through “fractal ontology and nonlinear causality,” 602 with levels of play that can be “multiplied into infinity” (PV 33). 603 7. I am here indebted to Steven Goldsmith’s claim that William Reddy and Eve 604 Sedgwick turn to the emotions as “the medium of critical agency” Cf. Ste- 605 ven Goldsmith, Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions (Baltimore, MD: 606 Johns Hopkins UP, 2013), p. 171. 607 8. See Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (2011): 608 434–472. 609 9. Ibid., 443. 610 10. Charles Altieri, in “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth 611 Leys,” Critical Inquiry 38, 4 (2012): 878–881, uses the example of mood to 612 question how much cognition is necessary for emotional states. Silvan Tom- 613 kins offers an interesting model of the affects. On the one hand, he considered 614 the affects to work like “scripts.” Thus affects like humiliation acquire a criti- 615 cal density that can become “self-igniting” (Affect Imagery Consciousness [New 616 York: Springer, 2008], 503). On the other hand, Tomkins remains alive to 617 the “high probability that the human being will ultimately utilize his feedback 618 mechanisms to maximize his positive affects” (12). I am more sympathetic to 619 Tomkins’ model. My beef is not so much with affect’s interest in the pre-sub- 620 jective, as it is with when it pre-empts and precludes the rational. 621 11. Paul E. Griffiths,What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Cat- 622 egories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 77. 623 12. Ibid., 84. Two places that promise to get us closer to these networks are the 624 worksUNCORRECTED of Jaak Panksepp and Joseph LeDoux. LeDoux PROOF argued that different 625 emotions had different functions and therefore different brain systems (The 626 Emotional Brain [New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996], 127). The more 627 involved the networks, the less it may be possible to separate out affect. Also Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 16/19

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628 see Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and 629 Animal Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), The Archaeology 630 of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of Human Emotion (New York: Norton, 631 2012). 632 13. Massumi argues that “every bodily event is flush with mentality” (PA 211). On Author Proof 633 the one hand, “affective cognition” or such mentality helpfully breaks down a 634 dualism between reason and emotion. On the other hand, there are stronger 635 and weaker forms of affective cognition, and thus the trick is how to address 636 that without reinstalling dualism. 637 14. See Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Deci- 638 sions (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009). 639 15. See Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (New York: Farrar, Straus and 640 Giroux, 2011). 641 16. See Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psycho- 642 logical Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 643 17. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (London: Penguin, 1984), 310. 644 18. Ibid., 310. 645 19. See Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University 646 Press, 2004). Further references are to this edition and will be cited paren- 647 thetically by page number in the text. 648 20. Clough argues that Lacan enabled critical theory to rethink the political by 649 rethinking relations among subjectivity, identity, meaning, bodies, and reality” (6). 650 21. As a DC Metro rider, I see commuters studiously avoid any interpersonal inter- 651 action; commuters retain their subjectivity. Massumi and Clough might draw 652 attention to their digital immediation. 653 22. I note here the subject has become the linguistic postmodern subject under 654 trauma; in this view, the affective turn relies upon a linguistic turn that has 655 already naturalized the subject ruptured by difference. 656 23. Jon Elster notes that “the study of the emotions is largely motivated by their 657 impact on action” (“Emotion and Action,” in Thinking About Feeling: Con- 658 temporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert Solomon [Oxford: Oxford 659 University Press, 2004], 151). I would add that the closer they come to 660 explaining action, the more prestige they have. 661 24. He will later insist that “affect …is inseparable from the concept of shock” 662 (PA 53). In Parables, Massumi commented that affect is “beyond infrastruc- 663 tural, it is everywhere, in effect” (45). His project then is to think about how 664 affect demands an emergent politics. 665 25. Massumi’s reading of the political ontology of threat, however, is extremely 666 suggestive. In “The Future of Affective Fact,” he argues that “the security that 667 preemption is explicitly meant to produce is predicated on its tacitly produc- 668 ing what it is meant to avoid: preemptive security is predicated on a produc- 669 tion of insecurity to which it itself contributes” (58). Perhaps, what makes this 670 piece so successful is that it is directed at a very specific affect at this historical 671 moment. 672 26. At oneUNCORRECTED point, Massumi argues that affect is “beyond infrastructural, PROOF it is eve- 673 rywhere, in effect” (PV 45). Paul Bloom in Against Empathy (New York: 674 HarperCollins, 2016) urges a turn away from empathy because empathy casts Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 17/19

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675 a narrow spotlight and does not adequately consider the consequences of 676 empathy. He urges instead a return to rational compassion. 677 27. Earlier Massumi had linked affect to “the autonomization of relation” (PV 37). 678 Leys critiques the scientific experiments upon which Massumi bases his theo- 679 ries (445–452). In particular, she critiques his understanding of a study that Author Proof 680 he interprets to show with regard to affect a separation of content and effect 681 (448). Such separation supports his separation of affect from cognition. 682 28. Suggestive is Brennan’s claim that “the transmission of affect turns any reduc- 683 tionist preconception about the priority of biological causality in social expla- 684 nation on its head” (21). Laura Otis offers this useful caution: “that people are 685 multi-faceted and open to change does not preclude one-of-a-kind personal 686 perspectives” (Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and 687 Artists [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], 217). 688 29. N. Katherine Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman (Chicago: Univer- 689 sity of Chicago Press, 1999) that embodiment amounts to contingency: the 690 particular experiences that come with having a particular body and that our 691 turn to information to think about embodiment allows us to think that we 692 can transcend all contingencies. Thus she reminds us that even information has 693 particular forms of embodiment. Massumi does admit that “how many degrees 694 of freedom there are, and where they can lead most directly, is certainly differ- 695 ent depending on how you are socially classified …but none of those condi- 696 tions or definitions are boxes that completely contain a person’s potential” (PA 697 40–41). My point is that bodily contingency is erased by virtuality. 698 30. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network 699 Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 2. 700 31. She treats rhythmic entrainment as a mechanism for contagion (70–72). 701 32. See Massumi (PA 32). 702 33. On feelings as entities from the vantage of spectatorship, see Hina Nazar’s 703 Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility (New 704 York: Fordham University Press, 2012). 705 34. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (New York: Dover, 2006), 38. 706 35. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 626. 707 36. Nazar argues that Hume sets up a distinction between fact and value, and puts 708 sentiment on the side of value, which must be felt. Value cannot be settled 709 by empirical science, she argues, because its object only exists as a felt entity 710 (29–30). Because Hume was an empiricist, I do not think this division is as 711 clear-cut as Nazar suggests. 712 37. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 466. 713 38. Christine Korsgaard, The Sources of Normativity, ed. Onora O’Neill (Cam- 714 bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 51. 715 39. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. Tom 716 L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 76. 717 40. Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, 641. 718 41. Ibid., 329. 719 42. Ibid., UNCORRECTED 627. PROOF 720 43. Smith, 66. 721 44. See Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to 722 Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006). Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 18/19

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723 45. Ibid., 178–179. 724 46. Smith, 128. 725 47. Bloom, 52. 726 48. In Against Empathy, Bloom shows how the valuing of empathy also denigrates 727 rationality. Although he recognizes that empathy has some potential to do Author Proof 728 good, he worries about how limited its spotlight is, and shows how empathy 729 rarely examines fully its consequences. While empathy allows us to attend to 730 particular individuals, it is unequipped to deal with mass suffering. 731 49. Cheshire Calhoun, “Subjectivity and Emotion,” in Thinking about Feeling: 732 Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, ed. Robert Solomon (Oxford: Oxford 733 University Press, 2004), 107–124, 109 cited. All further references will be 734 cited parenthetically by page number in the text. 735 50. Sianne Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005), 86. 736 51. Korsgaard, 96. 737 52. Ibid, 102. 738 53. Michael L. Frazer, The Enlightenment of Sympathy (Oxford: Oxford University 739 Press, 2010), 14. 740 54. Daniel Gross reminds us that rationality in the Enlightenment was not some- 741 thing that resided equally in all men and women of the time. He highlights 742 rationality as an “economy of scarcity” (178). While this is partly true, we 743 should also keep in mind Frazer’s insistence that sentimentality had resources 744 for its own improvement. 745 55. Kahneman, 77. 746 56. Margaret Gilbert, Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World (Oxford: 747 Oxford University Press, 2014), 100. 748 57. Ibid., 232–233.

749 Bibliography

750 Altieri, Charles. “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys.” 751 Critical Inquiry. 38, no. 4 (2012): 878–881. 752 Ariely, Dan. Predictably Irrational: The Hidden Forces that Shape Our Decisions. New 753 York: Harper Perennial, 2009. 754 Bloom, Paul. Against Empathy. New York: HarperCollins, 2016. 755 Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2014. 756 Calhoun, Cheshire. “Subjectivity and Emotion.” In Thinking about Feeling: Contem- 757 porary Philosophers on Emotions, edited by Robert Solomon, 107–124. Oxford: 758 Oxford University Press, 2004. 759 Clough, Patricia Ticineto, editor. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, 760 NC: Duke University Press, 2007. 761 Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological 762 Category. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 763 Elster, John. “Emotion and Action.” In Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Phi- 764 losophers onUNCORRECTED Emotions, edited by Robert Solomon, 151–162. Oxford:PROOF Oxford Uni- 765 versity Press, 2004. 766 Frazer, Michael L. The Enlightenment of Sympathy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 767 2010. 768 Gilbert, Margaret. Joint Commitment: How We Make the Social World. Oxford: Oxford 769 University Press, 2014. Layout: T1 HuSSci Book ID: 419066_1_En Book ISBN: 978-3-319-63303-9 Chapter No.: 9 Date: 24 August 2017 17:32 Page: 19/19

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770 Goldsmith, Steven. Blake’s Agitation: Criticism and the Emotions. Baltimore, MD: 771 Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013. 772 Gregg, Melissa and Gregory J. Seigworth, editors. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham, 773 NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 774 Griffiths, Paul E.What Emotions Really Are. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, Author Proof 775 1997. 776 Gross, Daniel M. The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern 777 Brain Science. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. 778 Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago 779 Press, 1999. 780 Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by Ernest Mossner. London: 781 Penguin Books, 1985. 782 ———. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Edited by Tom L. Beau- 783 champ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. 784 Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 785 2011. 786 Kandel, Eric R. The Age of Insight: The Quest to Understand the Unconscious in Art, 787 Mind, and Brain. New York: Random House, 2012. 788 Korsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity. Edited by Onora O’Neill. Cam- 789 bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. 790 Latour, Bruno. Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory. 791 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005. 792 LeDoux, Joseph. The Emotional Brain. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996. 793 Lennard, Natasha and Cary Wolfe. “Is Humanism Really Humane?.” New York Times, 794 January 9, 2017. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/09/opinion/is-human- 795 ism-really-humane.html. 796 Leys, Ruth. “The Turn to Affect: A Critique.” Critical Inquiry 37, no. 3 (2011): 797 434–472. 798 Massumi, Brian. “The Future Birth of the Affective Fact: The Political Ontology of 799 Fact.” The Affective Theory Reader, edited by Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seig- 800 worth, 52–70. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010. 801 ———. Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke Uni- 802 versity Press, 2002. 803 ———. Politics of Affect. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2015. 804 Nazar, Hina. Enlightened Sentiments: Judgment and Autonomy in the Age of Sensibility. 805 New York: Fordham University Press, 2012. 806 Ngai, Sianne. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. 807 Otis, Laura. Rethinking Thought: Inside the Minds of Creative Scientists and Artists. 808 Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. 809 Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emo- 810 tions Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 811 Panksepp, Jaak and Lucy Biven. The Archaeology of Mind: Neuroevolutionary Origins of 812 Human Emotion. New York: Norton, 2012. 813 Plamper, Jan. The History of Emotions: An Introduction. Translated by Keith Tribe. 814 Oxford:UNCORRECTED Oxford University Press, 2012. PROOF 815 Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Dover, 2006. 816 Tomkins, Silvan. Affect Imagery Consciousness. New York: Springer, 2008. Author Query Form Book ID: 419066_1_En 1 3 Author Proof Chapter No: 9 I Please ensure you fill out your response to the queries raised below and return this form along with your corrections.

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