This article investigates how the turn to affect within the humanities and social sciences re-imagines the relationship between cultural theory and science. We focus on how the writings of two neuroscientists (Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux) and one developmental psychologist (Daniel Stern) are used in order to ground certain claims about affect within cultural theory. We examine the motifs at play in cultural theories of affect, the models of (neuro)biology with which they work, and some fascinating missteps characterizing the taking up of scientific literature. While neuroscience frames the affective as part of a system of regulation that makes both self and social coherence possible, in cultural theory’s narratives, by contrast, affectivity becomes a placeholder for the inherent dynamism and mutability of matter. The article interrogates the consequences of cultural theory’s strange borrowings from neuroscience and developmental psychology in their institution of a model of subjectivity preoccupied with a lived present in excess of the hold of habit and embodied history.

Biology's Gift: Interrogating the Turn to Affect

Suzanne Keen is the Thomas H. Broadus Professor of English at Washington and Lee University

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Introduction: Narrative and the Emotions

This book offers a resolution of the paradox posed by the pleasure of tragedy by returning to its earliest articulations in archaic Greek poetry and its subsequent emergence as a philosophical problem in Plato's Republic. Socrates' claim that tragic poetry satisfies our 'hunger for tears' hearkens back to archaic conceptions of both poetry and mourning that suggest a common source of pleasure in the human appetite for heightened forms of emotional distress. By unearthing a psychosomatic model of aesthetic engagement implicit in archaic poetry and philosophically elaborated by Plato, this volume not only sheds new light on the Republic's notorious indictment of poetry, but also identifies rationally and ethically disinterested sources of value in our pursuit of aesthetic states. In doing so the book resolves an intractable paradox in aesthetic theory and human psychology: the appeal of painful emotions.

Tragic Pleasure from Homer to Plato

This essay concerns the role of political affect in cinema. As a case study, I analyze the 2006 film V for Vendetta as cinematic rhetoric. Adopting a multi-modal approach that focuses on the interplay of discourse, figure, and ground, I contend that the film mobilizes viewers at a visceral level to reject a politics of apathy in favor of a politics of democratic struggle. Based on the analysis, I draw conclusions related to the evaluation of cinematic rhetoric, the political import of mass art, and the character and role of affect in politics.

The Visceral Politics of V for Vendetta: On Political Affect in Cinema

Ewan James Jones argues that Coleridge engaged most significantly with philosophy not through systematic argument, but in verse. Jones carries this argument through a series of sustained close readings, both of canonical texts such as Christabel and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and also of less familiar verse, such as Limbo. Such work shows that the essential elements of poetic expression - a poem's metre, rhythm, rhyme and other such formal features - enabled Coleridge to think in an original and distinctive manner, which his systematic philosophy impeded. Attentiveness to such formal features, which has for some time been overlooked in Coleridge scholarship, permits a rethinking of the relationship between eighteenth-century verse and philosophy more broadly, as it engages with issues including affect, materiality and self-identity. Coleridge's poetic thinking, Jones argues, both consolidates and radicalises the current literary critical rediscovery of form.

Coleridge and the Philosophy of Poetic Form

Charles Altieri. The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. 299 pp. $52.50 cloth; $22.50 paper. In this recent book, Charles Altieri pits cognitivist philosophy against an aesthetic approach to emotions in order to acknowledge the central role of the affects in human experience and to reveal the "knowledge" this experience can make available. The arts are his key example of how affects should be theorized and understood. He characterizes cognitivist philosophy as inadequate to the depth, temporality, and value of affects in human experience. Instead, he proposes a more phenomenological understanding of the affects, which for him include feelings, moods, emotions, and passions. All feelings are suffused with the agent's imagination, but feelings are most closely related to sensations. By contrast, mood is an atmosphere colored by a particular feeling, emotions entail narrative projections, and passions are feelings that agents identify strongly with. Although focusing mostly on feelings and emotions, Altieri addresses the matter of identification throughout the book and thus frequently addresses passions without always using the term. Altieri's theorizing is wide-ranging and ambitious, but his claims are carefully focused. The book synthesizes and adapts recent theory about the emotions to make a plea that the arts have much to teach philosophy about the range and value of the affects. At the outset of his study, Altieri flatly states his preference for close reading over historical or sociological interpretations, yet his theorizing is sensitive to the social aspects of texts because of the central role played by the concept of performativity in his argument. Altieri's manner of addressing his readers makes the book a pleasure to read; his text is characterized by an affable manner throughout and salted with an unobtrusive joke or two along the way. Altieri begins with a critique of cognitivist philosophy. He argues that emotions are not beliefs and so are not reducible to rational propositions and predictable formulas. The overall claim of the book is that literary criticism should attend to the agent's psychological adjustments to his or her circumstances and to the affects provoked by them. In order to accomplish this goal, criticism must focus on specific features of style instead of static themes and oversimplifying allegories. The Particulars of Rapture rigorously defends the value of emotional experience against both the domination of reason imposed by philosophy and the behavioral norms imposed by ethics. Each chapter builds on the arguments of the previous one, although this may seem less true of the final chapters than the early ones. Altieri discusses both visual art and literature, primarily poetry. The first chapter explains why the arts provide one of the best ways to understand affects, while the second chapter applies the claims of chapter one to exemplary readings of two paintings (Caravaggio's The Fortune Teller and Titian's Ecce Homo) and subsequent readings of others. The book does not reproduce all of the art works Altieri discusses, although it does include all of the major ones. Altieri (and perhaps his publisher) evidently chose to include only the works most central to his argument. This may be due to the difficulty of obtaining permission to reproduce them, but more of Altieri's elegant interpretations of paintings by famous artists deserve to be set against reproductions that will reinforce his readers' grasp of the points he makes about the visual text he addresses. The absence of reproductions for all the art works discussed is understandable for reasons of cost, but it nevertheless weakens the force of an otherwise effective argument by leaving out some of the particulars that Altieri wants his readers to focus on. For Altieri the affects are important because of their relation to identity. The affects should be understood in adverbial rather than adjectival terms, he argues, for affects are fluid rather than substantive, more a matter of the human agent being moved than a definitive state to be entered and exited. …

The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects

Henry James's What Maisie Knew is, in Paul Theroux's felicitous phrase, "a novel of thrusting hands" (7). Many critics have observed the importance of the novel's extensive hand imagery, yet no one has done a systematic study of that imagery. The hidden significance behind the repeated patterns of hand images in What Maisie Knew, however, justifies a particularly close analysis of those patterns. The shifting dynamic of power relations between Maisie and the other characters in What Maisie Knew may be charted and interpreted, for example, by focusing on a particular gesture that recurs throughout the book: the laying of one's own hand upon that of another person. The curious repetitions and variations of the verb-phrase "to lay one's hand upon" suggest that in the novel power and possession are communicated through touch. It is therefore significant that Sir Claude and Maisie more frequently act as the subjects of the verb-phrase in its various mutations than do any of the novel's other characters. Sir Claude's frequent resting of his hand upon Maisie ultimately empowers her, for his gesture subverts the code of power established by the other adults in the book.(1) Claude's laying-on of hands confers authority and blesses, for when he performs the gesture it routinely stimulates and consecrates Maisie's growth as an individual. The touches of all the other adults, however, communicate their attempts to control and manipulate Maisie. While all the hands that fall on Maisie make some claim to possess her, Claude's hand alone conveys freedom. By contrasting the body language used by Claude in his primarily positive relationship to Maisie with that of the other adults in their fundamentally destructive relationships to her (including, of course, Maisie's parents), James reveals the moral limitations of nineteenth-century family law. James criticizes such law by focusing on the adults' treatment of Maisie as an object to be possessed, for English law traditionally considered the child to be a servant (and hence a possession) of the father (Presser and Zainaldin 519-20).(2) The laying of an adult hand upon Maisie represents a kind of claim which, given the legal definition of the child as possession of the father, can be interpreted as an expression of legally sanctioned power. James articulates and criticizes the enduring legacy of the legal ideology that equated the child with a possession through his distinctive repetition of the phrase "to lay one's hand on _________" throughout the narrative of Maisie's development. The novel opens with a prologue that relates the post-divorce battle for custody of the only child produced by the marriage of Ida and Beale Farange. Although the account of the settlement reached between the two parties indicates that the father wins custody, the fact that the divorce court did not unreservedly favor the father's petition for this custody suggests that the action of the novel occurs in a period of the nineteenth century when the legal protocol for awarding custody of children in England was changing: from the Middle Ages until the modern era (including well into the nineteenth century), the common law preferred "the father, and not the mother, in the matter of guardianship of the child" (Einhorn 123). In the period in which the events of the novel occur, the traditional judicial prejudice which favored the father in awarding custody of children has thus begun to be abandoned (Presser and Zainaldin 537). The development of the principle of "the best interest of the child" as the guiding factor in the determination of custody rights is a specifically modern legal precept. (3) An early articulation of this precept occurs in British law in 1839. In that year, the British Parliament modified . . . father-centered rules of child custody, in an act which authorized English equity courts to enter orders for the access of the mother to her young children and, if the child was under seven years old, to require that it be delivered to and remain in the custody of the mother until reaching the age of seven. …

Handing over Power in James's What Maisie Knew

Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing. Oxford UP, 2010.Matthew Hart's Nations of Nothing but Poetry contributes to the growing field of transnational criticism, joining such studies as Anita Patterson's Race, American Literature, and Transnational Modernisms (Cambridge UP, 2008) and Jahan Ramazani's Transnational Poetics (U of Chicago P, 2009). Although Hart derives his main concept of the synthetic vernacular from the poetics of Hugh MacDiarmid, he persuasively explains why the concept also applies to Basil Bunting, Edward Kamau Brathwaite, and Melvin Toison.Drawing on Edward Sapir's belief that "'provincial' language is a fundamental element of literary art," Hart zeroes in on the contradiction between the materiality of language, particularly in the form of dialects, and the universal appeal of successful literature (8). To explain what he means by "synthetic vernacular," he draws on Adorno's claim that "the concept does not exhaust the thing conceived." Hart equates Adorno's concept with "the idea of a language that articulates some collective sense of nationality," while he correlates the thing conceived with the "actual" poetic discourse of nationhood (8). From this perspective, the vernacular can only be synthetic because the sign is never wholly adequate to the concept. Focusing on this divide, Hart explores how different poets from both sides of the Atlantic forge distinctive idioms in relation to their specific dreams of nationhood. He relates his study to modernism's preoccupation with mimesis by examining the way his poets "strain the representational norms of vernacular language to the breaking point, thereby registering the contradictoriness - and uncanny durability - of the politics of locality in a transnational age" (16).Hart views MacDiarmid's "Synthetic Scots poetry as a creative solution to the problem of reconciling Scottish nationalism and socialist internationalism" (52). He argues that this solution is only partially effective because of Scotland's contradictory status as a partner in promoting the British Empire and as a victim of English linguistic domination. The characteristic gesture of a MacDiarmid poem is always double, as in the following example: "Noisy, inorganic, and dredged up from textbooks and dictionaries, the language of 'On a Raised Beach' . . . binds language to a place . . . and yet reveals it to be always out of place, forever rejoining and remaking the world" (67). To explain this dynamic, Hart contrasts MacDiarmid's method with Pound' s in Cathay: "Rather than comprising a systematic reflection on the contemporarneity of an ethnohistorical type, the 'nexus of personae' at work in MacDiarmid's Scots poems are part of a catch-as-catch-can program to 'represent an alternative Scot' in the present moment" (65). Hart sees this as laudable but also notices that it undercuts the political efficacy of MacDiarmid's thought. In the long run, for MacDiarmid, "poetry ... is the true test of politics, its forms and languages allowing for imaginative complexities far greater than those encompassed by mere theory." Unfortunately, however, "this aesthetic victory has little parallel at the level of activism or political theory" (77).In his chapter on Bunting, Hart tries to account for the paradox of what the poet "called 'a dialect written in the spelling of the capital' - a Northumbrian vernacular verse, that is, which looks like Standard English" (79). As with MacDiarmid, Hart detects a regional cosmopolitanism at workin Bunting's writing, a quality he connects to synthetic vernacularism. For Hart, the chief tension driving Bunting's poetry is the tension between the dialect of the spoken word and the potential durability of the written word. His poem Briggflatts "never engages with graphic forms of writing without also troubling their suitability for recording a life and defining a Northumbrian poetics" (88). …

Jeff Westover

Papers

The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects

Handing over Power in James's What Maisie Knew

Matthew Hart. Nations of Nothing but Poetry: Modernism, Transnationalism, and Synthetic Vernacular Writing