On patheme: affective shifts and Gustavian culture

ABSTRACT

Despite the attention that the affective sphere has reached in the last decades, affectivity has generally been supposed to be a consequence of historical processes, not changing their direction. This article argues instead that affectivity can be a driving force in historical change, and it establishes the concept of “patheme” in relation to Michel Foucault’s “episteme”, Martin Heidegger’s “history of being” and the notion of regime in William Reddy, Jacques Rancière and Peter de Bolla. What is described as a pathemic change took place in the thoroughgoing affective transformation of European culture during the 18th century, a cultural change that in Sweden was condensed into much more compressed shifts during the Gustav III’s reign (1772–92). This latter period is bestowed an investigation grounded in an understanding of historical processes that considers the interplay between layers such as power relations, social conditions and modes of scientific thought along with affectivity. The interplay is described in terms of polyphony.

Keywords:

• Patheme
• affectivity
• historical processes
• episteme
• emotional regimes
• 18th-century culture

Acknowledgments

In its earliest form, this article was presented as a paper held at a conference of The European Philosophical Society for the Study of Emotions in 2018. The article was also discussed at the Higher Seminar in Aesthetics at Uppsala University in 2021, to which I was kindly invited by Elisabeth Schellekens Dammann. Sven-Olov Wallenstein and Åsa Arketeg have made important remarks thereafter, and useful advices came from two anonymous reviewers of this journal.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Cf. Magnus Olausson, Den engelska parken i Sverige under gustaviansk tid (Stockholm: Byggförlaget, Olausson 1993).

2. Cf. Mikael Ahlund, Landskapets röster: Studier i Elias Martins bildvärld (Stockholm: Atlantis, Ahlund 2011) and Gunnar Berefelt, Svensk landskapskonst från renässans till romantik (Stockholm: Norstedt, Berefelt 1965).

3. Cf. Johan Henric Kellgren, letter to Abraham Niclas Clewberg 2 Mar. 1781, in Samlade skrifter, vol. 6 (Stockholm: Bonnier, Kellgren 1923), 99–103 and Erik Wallrup, “Känslosamheter—Om den sentimentala parken, salongen och operasalongen”, in Vingslag över Haga, ed. by Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien (Stockholm: Kungl. Vitterhets historie och antikvitets akademien, Wallrup 2019), 16–20.

4. Bertil van Boer, “Gustavian Opera: An Overview”, in Gustavian Opera: Swedish Opera, Dance and Theatre 1771–1809, ed. Inger Mattsson (Stockholm: Royal Swedish Academy of Music,1991, 159.

5. William M. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Reddy 2001); Jacques Rancière, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art, trans. Zakir Paul (London and New York: Verso, Rancière 2013) and “The Distribution of the Sensible”, in The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (London and New York: Continuum, Rancière 2004, 2023); Burkhard Meyer-Sickendiek, Zärtlichkeit: Höfische Galanterie als Ursprung der bürgerlichen Empfindsamkeit (Munich: Fink, Meyer-Sickendiek 2016); James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, Johnson 1995; Rancière 2023); Peter de Bolla, The Education of the Eye: Painting, Landscape, and Architecture in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003). The list of works could of course be multiplied several times, covering literature within fields such as the studies of the arts, history, the history of emotions and the history of ideas; taking the different language areas into account the number of titles would rise exponentially.

6. I here follow Meyer-Sickendiek. An important reference of his is to Delphine Denis’s article “Les Inventions de Tendre”, Intermédialités 4 (2004Denis 2004; Rancière 2023): 45–66.

7. Rancière has recently discussed the English landscape garden in relation to the aesthetic regime, but he states that the radical change came only with its later advocates such as Uvedale Price, William Gilpin and Richard Payne Knight. Cf. Jacques Rancière, The Time of the Landscape: On the Origins of the Aesthetic Revolution, trans. Emiliano Battista (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2023).

8. An investigation of this period in terms of cultural transfer and histoire croissée has been made by me in “An Academy of Academies: The Cultural Transfer of the ‘Academy of Music’ to Sweden”, in Courts, Colonies, and Cosmopolitan Exchange in Eighteenth-Century Music: Selected Papers from the Ninth Biennial Conference of the Society for Eighteenth-Century Music, Stockholm and Zoom, 6–14 August 2021, ed. Beverly Wilcox (Ann Arbor, Mich.: Steglein Publishing, forthcoming).

9. The concept was introduced by me in the article “Turning an Occasion into an Event: Patheme, Mood and Atmosphere at the Funeral of Gustav III”, in Resounding Spaces: Approaching Musical Atmospheres, ed. Federica Scassilo (Milano: Mimesis International, 2020). It is also referred to in my article “Music’s Attunement: Stimmung, Mood, Atmosphere”, in The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music, eds Jonathan De Souza, Benjamin Steege and Jessica Wiskus (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming).

10. The treatment of this period can only take some of the most exemplary cases into account. An extensive rendering awaits in a monography planned as the final result of my project “The Affective Shift of Music in the Gustavian Era”, financed by the Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Sweden.

11. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 145–146.

12. Gustaf Johan Ehrensvärd, Dagboksanteckningar förda vid Gustaf III:s hov af friherre Gustaf Johan Ehrensvärd: Första delen, Journal för åren 1776 och 1779 samt berättelse om Svenska Teaterns uppkomst (Stockholm: Norstedt, Ehrensvärd 1878), 216.

13. Birgitta Schyberg, “‘Gustaf Wasa’ as Theatre Propaganda”, in Mattsson (ed.), Gustavian Opera, 320.

14. Cf. Schyberg, “‘Gustaf Wasa’ as Theatre Propaganda”, 300.

15. Fredrik August Dahlgren, Anteckningar om Stockholms Theatrar (Stockholm: Norstedt, Dahlgren 1866), 233.

16. Johan Fischerström, En gustaviansk dagbok: Johan Fischerströms anteckningar för året 1773 (Stockholm: Bröderna Lagerström, Fischerström 1951), 110: “hvar och en”. My translation. All translations from Swedish are made by me if not indicated by the translator’s name.

17. Overt references for the king could be made in prologues, though: that was for instance the case with Gudmund Jöran Adlerbeth’s translation of Antoine Léonard Thomas’s libretto to the opéra-ballet Amphion, set to music by Naumann (1778). However, the prologue was written for the occasion of Gustav III’s birthday.

18. Bengt Lidner, “Året 1783”, in Samlade skrifter (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1878), 62: “O folk! Tyranners skräck! Du mänsklighetens ära!”.

19. Lidner, “Året 1783”, 79: “Om fordom, store kung! det stolta Rom dig sett,/Dig Cato, råd och folk en envåldspira gett”.

20. Rancière, The Time of the Landscape, x.

21. Rancière, Aisthesis, 1–2.

22. de Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 16.

23. de Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 6.

24. de Bolla, The Education of the Eye, 148.

25. Cf. Ahlund, Landskapets röster, 116–117.

26. Ahlund, Landskapets röster, 286.

27. Joseph Martin Kraus, Etwas von und über Musik fürs Jahr 1777, facsimile of the 1778 original (Munich and Salzburg: Katzbichler, Kraus 1977, 1977), 6: “eine eigentliche Sache fürs Herz”. This musical sentimentality would find an echo in the musical discussions in the Musical Society of the university town of Åbo (Turku) during the last decade of the century, described in Jukka Sarjala’s Music, Morals, and the Body: An Academic Issue in Turku 1653–1808 (Helsinki: Finnish Literary Society, Sarjala 2001), 184–229. In this fine study, Sarjala shows the affective change from affectus understood as movement (within the body and music) of the first half of the 18th century to the sensibility of the second half with a self heard in tones, grounded in sympathy.

28. The “Germanic strength” of the symphony has been traced in Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony—an overt example of music in the grand style—by the musicologist A. Peter Brown in “Stylistic Maturity and Regional Influence: Joseph Martin Kraus’s Symphonies in C# Minor (Stockholm, 1782) and C Minor (Vienna, 1783?)”, in Studies in Musical Sources and Style: Essays in honor of Jan LaRue, eds Eugene K. Wolf and Edward H. Roesner (Madison, Wisc.: A-R Editions, 1990), 413–414.

29. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 105.

30. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 124.

31. Cf. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, 216.

32. The review, published in Critique 1967, is focused on episteme, and Canguilhem asks if it is really “something more than an intellectual construct” and that it is “what the person talking about it says it is”. Georges Canguilhem, “The Death of Man, or Exhaustion of the Cogito?”, trans. Catherine Porter, The Cambridge Companion to Foucault, ed. Gary Gutting (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Canguilhem 1994), 81.

33. Henry George Liddell, Robert Scott, Henry Stuart Jones and Roderick McKenzie, A Greek-English lexicon, 9. ed., rev. and augm. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, Liddell et al. 1996), 1285.

34. Aristotle, On Interpretation, in: Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics, trans. Harold P. Cooke and Hugh Tredennick (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1938), 115 [I. 16a5].

35. Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences(New York: Random House, 1971), xxii.

36. Michel Foucault, The History of Madness, trans. Jonathan Murphy (London and New York: Routledge, Foucault 2006), 226.

37. Foucault, The History of Madness, 226.

38. Foucault, The History of Madness, 227.

39. Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow, Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, Dreyfus and Rabinow 1982).

40. Jürgen Habermas, Der philosophische Diskurs der Moderne: Zwölf Vorlesungen (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, Habermas 1984). The English translation was published in 1987 as The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. Frederick G. Lawrence (Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1987).

41. Michel Foucault, “The Return of Morality”, in Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977–1984 (New York and London: Routledge, Foucault 1990), 250. Michael Schwartz shows with great care that Foucault’s main reference was Heidegger’s two-volume work Nietzsche, published for the first time 1961. Cf. Michael Schwartz, “Epistemes and the History of Being”, in Foucault and Heidegger: Critical Encounters, eds Alan Milchman and Alan Rosenberg (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota University Press, Schwartz 2003), 164.

42. The expression “voice of being” appears in Heidegger’s philosophy of the event (Ereignis) during the late 1930s and the beginning of the 1940s. Responding to the silent voice of being is a way of relating to being (das Seyn, as Heidegger spells non-metaphysical being).

43. Martin Heidegger, What is Philosophy?, trans. William Kluback and Jean T. Wilde (London: Vision, Heidegger 1958), 77–91, cit. 91.

44. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning), trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, Heidegger 1999), 277.

45. Martin Heidegger, Contributions to Philosophy, 19.

46. Martin Heidegger, “Postscript to ‘What is Metaphysics?’”, in Pathmarks, trans. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Heidegger 1998), 233–234.

47. In semiotics, patheme has been defined as “l’ensemble des conditions discursives nécessaire à la manifestation d’une passion-effet de sens”. Algirdas Julien Greimas and Jacques Fontanille, Sémiotique des passions: Des états de choses aux états d’âme (Paris: Seuil, Greimas and Fontanille 1991), 85. William Mosley-Jensen defines patheme as a rhetorical device: “A patheme is an emotionally full signifier that works by transferring a powerful sentiment through language and people.” William Mosley-Jensen “Argumentative Dimensions of Pathos: The Patheme in Obama’s 2012 State of the Union Address”, in Disturbing Argument: Selected Works from the 18th NCA/AFA Alta Conference of Argumentation, ed. Catherine H. Palczewski (London and New York: Routledge, Mosley-Jensen 2015), 274. In philosophy, the role of mathematics in Alain Badiou’s thinking has been contrasted to affectivity in Michel Henry, a polarisation between mathemes and pathemes. Cf. John Mullarkey, Post-Continental Philosophy: An Outline (London: Continuum, Foucault 2006), 125–134.

48. Martin Heidegger, “The Origin of the Work of art”, in Off the Beaten Track, trans. and eds Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Heidegger 2002), 20–21.

49. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, Heidegger 1996), 129. Italics in the original.

50. For instance in Martin Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time: Prolegomena, trans. Theodore Kiesel (Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, Heidegger 1992).

51. Heidegger devotes a section of Contributions to Philosophy to “the ones to come”, who are “attuned” and therefore “destined by the last god”, in contrast to everybody else in the modern world. Heidegger, “VI. The Ones to Come”, Contribution to Philosophy, 275–281, cit. 278.

52. Here, I am in line with the historian of emotions Rob Boddice, when he writes that “the affective life of humans is as much a moving force as anything else, and in fact is not distinguishable from political, economic or rational dynamics”. Rob Boddice, A History of Feelings (London: Reaktion Books, Boddice 2019), 15.

53. Strangely enough, the structure of Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy can be said to be fugal (cf. Iain Thomson (2003), ‘The Philosophical Fugue: Understanding the Structure and Goal of Heidegger’s Beiträge, Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 34, no. 1, 2003: 57–73), even if it must be noted that Heidegger uses Fügungen (jointures) for the different sections of that work. The notion of “polyphony” or “counterpoint” in relation to thought and different modes of analysis is often nothing but a metaphor or a figure of speech. Among the contributors to a non-trivial understanding of such polyphony, we find Friedrich Nietzsche, Mikhail Bachtin and Edward Said.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Riksbankens jubileumsfond, Sweden, under Grant P17-0625:1