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Dispatches from the Emotional Rollercoaster Dispatches from the Emotional Rollercoaster Rob Boddice Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter Friedrich-Meinecke-Institut, Freie Universität Berlin oU CaN’t mEasurE lovE,” of physiological and psychological research “ I said. The consternation among methods that have promised to bring the the assembled psychologists, eating inside out. Since we all know what love is lunchY in the garden of a Swiss chateau when we see it, and since we can assess it outside Geneva, was palpable. I had, qualitatively just like that—the two lovers unwittingly, uttered an unorthodox phrase; in a field—why not also subject it to a heresy that, if it were taken seriously, functional magnetic resonance imaging and would make many of the assembled see what is “really” going on in the brain? company redundant. The scale of the chasm The problem, and the sticking point I was between us became clear. We were at the trying to articulate when I had brazenly International Summer School of the claimed that you can’t measure love, is that Affective Sciences seemingly with a common whatever measurements come out of this purpose: to talk about emotions and scenario, even the most simplistic reading emotion research. But it is apparent that of the observer of two lovers in a field, are when it comes to “emotions,” scientists in only good for that particular context, and different disciplines are scarcely talking for that particular time. The very image in about the same things at all. question is highly specific. It is, implicitly, Of course you can measure love. modern, western, and romantic. In the vast “Imagine, you see two people, standing in a majority of public spaces in the world, it is field on a sunny day, gazing into each also implicitly heteronormative. Where the other’s eyes, holding hands,” said a people in question are imagined to be of the bewildered lunchmate. “You can say with same sex, the image is confined to places confidence that they are in love. And of characterized by specific liberal progressive course you can measure what’s going on in value systems. And the more tightly we focus that moment.” Heart rate, blood pressure, on such configurations, the more we see the all manner of hormone levels, but especially implicit whiteness of the loving couple in the “love hormone,” oxytocin, and brain the field. In how many places in the world is activity: emotion scientists can measure all this scene imaginable? And where such this, and study what’s going on in our bodies public displays, heterosexual or otherwise, and in our heads in real time. My are not permitted or tolerated, what then interlocutor was in earnest, and had on his for our easy recognition of what love is, side the methodological inertia of a century what it feels like, how it is practiced? 94 Athenaeum Review_FINAL_KS_4.17.19.indd 94 4/17/19 3:02 PM If this is a problem along the axis of space crude and simplistic to say that, at the end or culture, then it is compounded along the of the day, it’s all the “love” that we—a word axis of time. My historicist alarm that is already a bundle of assumptions— immediately sounded on hearing this bundle already know. What I really mean, therefore, of common sense and accepted truths, as if by “you can’t measure love,” is that any this were an image of love for the ages. If the measurements you may make of whatever casual ethnocentrism weren’t troubling love you identify will be good for that love enough, the apparent naivete concerning the and that methodology in that time and history of “love” heightened my sense of space. As a science, that sounds a bit unease. Gestures—holding hands, for limited. Such was my point. Having lunch example—are historically specific and among the vineyards, under the Alps, the subject to historical research. There’s no way point was missed. to know, without contextual information, what the holding of hands means. The same might be said of the gaze. And, of course, hat was a historian doing among so romantic love also has a history.1 People W many psychologists in the first haven’t always “fallen” into it. It emerged at a place? In recent years I’ve had these kinds of specific historical and cultural juncture, and conversations with neuroscientists, its prescribed “rules” have changed over time. psychiatrists and psychologists. My aim is Looking more broadly at love over time, we to break the history of emotions out of its find that it is political, social, filial, strategic. disciplinary fetters and confront the wider If we include other languages in our survey world of emotion science or emotion we find that, more often than not, “love” isn’t research with its particular knowledge actually love at all. Love is amor and caritas in claims. Two decades of concentrated Latin. Love is philia, storge, agape, and eros empirical research into the history of (among others) in Greek. C. Stephen Jaeger emotions has armed historians with broad famously documented the medieval history knowledge claims about what emotions are, of “ennobling love,” now lost; Nicole how they work, and upon what they are Eustace wrote the story of “love” in pre- contingent. After many years of going revolutionary America, when the self was unheeded by the emotion-science world, conceived of socially, not individually, and something has changed. The door to the where “matches” were made according to humanities stands open. The promise is of a status politics, with affection being a truly interdisciplinary sphere of knowledge consequence, not a precondition, of on human feelings, but in order to fulfil it, marriage. I have tried to chart the history of first there must be disruption. It is already the “tender emotion(s),” or tendre, under messy. which love was subsumed, for at least two In order to understand the current sense centuries of European history.2 It would be of disorder and disquiet among emotion scientists, first we have to understand what 1 William Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and has been at stake. Since the 1970s, a small Sexuality in Europe, Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE (Chicago: group of scholars—American psychologists University of Chicago Press, 2012). and evolutionary biologists, principally— 2 C. Stephen Jaegar, Ennobling Love: In Search of A Lost have carved out a theory of emotions that Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Nicole Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, has dominated western thinking on the and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: affective lives of humans. The core claims of University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion, 2019), 97-105. these theories, usually presented as Sciences and Arts 95 Athenaeum Review_FINAL_KS_4.17.19.indd 95 4/17/19 3:02 PM inflexible facts, are as follows: emotions in It’s the kind of public impact for scholarly humans are universal; they are limited in work about which most academics wouldn’t number (the canonical number of “basic” even dare to dream. Basic emotions, emotions is six, but claims have ranged universality, and automaticity became, in between three and ten); they are accounted an all-encompassing sense, orthodox. for by the “deep” brain, that is, the structures Anthropological research ran in parallel of the human mind that evolved tens, if not with the rise of emotion science, gainsaying hundreds of thousands of years ago; they many of its central claims by direct are automatic psychological and somatic observation and hard-won experience, but responses to situations; they are represented to no avail. on the face by expressions that are also Enter Lisa Feldman Barrett. Her work, as automatic and universal across humanity. a psychologist, radically upset the prevailing Often, within this set of axioms, a bone is paradigm, and caught the attention of thrown to cultural influence on emotional historians and anthropologists who finally coloring or expression. On the whole, saw an opening for their influence. however, culture has been presented as Feldman Barrett has seen through Ekman’s nothing more than a gloss or veneer, sitting methodological holes and, in her own atop, and not fundamentally altering, research, summed up in her best-selling biological constants that lie beneath. book, How Emotions Are Made, found no The better-known names associated with evidence of universality or of basic emotions all this are Paul Ekman, Carrol Izard, Sylvan at all.3 Instead, Feldman Barrett posits a Tomkins, and Antonio Damasio, but the theory of biocultural construction, providing influence of this line of thinking has been empirical data in support of her claims. profound, both within and beyond the The plastic, developing brain learns how to world of science. feel in the worldly context in which it is Ekman, for example, sought to dominate situated. Brain, body, and world are not only the academic understanding of dynamically interrelated, such that the emotions, but also the policy implications color palette of emotion is as varied as of such an understanding and the public cultural contexts are richly distinct from reception of emotion knowledge. His one another. Moreover, she rejects the theory of universal affect, as witnessed on notion that discrete emotions are “located” the universal human face, allowed him to in discrete parts of the brain, pointing to pioneer and market facial profiling as an whole-brain engagement in affective important component of security screening experiences. The only law, in Feldman in the United States. He made a successful Barrett’s estimation, is the law of infinite business out of his methodology.
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