The path to the machine: affect studies, technology, and the question of ineffability

ABSTRACT

From the 1990s to the early twenty-first century, a range of writers in sociology, history, and cultural studies would increasingly see emotion as an important area of study. This “affective turn” has offered an important corrective to standard scientific conceptions of emotion, highlighting the mysteries of embodiment that are ignored by a narrowly empirical approach. While celebrating this development, this paper offers a series of cautions drawn from a comparative history of scholarly attention to emotion. Similarly to the early twenty-first century understanding of affect, the social sciences of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century employed a neo-romantic conception of emotion. By the 1920s, this idea would be subsumed into a new scientific paradigm that saw the new recording technologies as perfect vehicles for taming the mysteries of emotion. I discuss strategies for avoiding this scientizing of emotion in our own period, which is similarly taken with a series of “new technologies.”

KEYWORDS:

• Affect
• emotion
• technology
• critical theory
• rhetoric of science

Acknowledgments

The author thanks David Marshall and the participants in the “Affects of the Common” reading group at the University of Pittsburgh for their helpful conversations while developing these arguments.

Notes

1. Brian Massumi, “The Autonomy of Affect,” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 88.

2. Ibid., 85.

3. Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins,” Critical Inquiry 21, issue 2 (1995): 513.

4. Ibid., 511.

5. Patricia Clough, “Introduction,” in The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social, ed. Patricia Clough and Jean Halley (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 2.

6. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth, “An Inventory of Shimmers,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

7. Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37, issue 3 (2011).

8. Ibid., 469.

9. Ibid.

10. I will take emotionality to be a more general and neutral term than “affect” or “emotion,” though will at times need to employ such adjectives as “affective” and “emotive” to describe various emotionalities.

11. Leo Marx, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964).

12. On the differences between the passions and emotion, see Daniel Gross, The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle's Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); and Peter Stearns, American Cool; Constructing a Twentieth-Century Emotional Style (New York: New York University Press, 1994).

13. Stearns, American Cool. The arguments here and throughout rely on and extend my arguments in Brenton J. Malin, Feeling Mediated: A History of Technology and Emotion in America (New York: New York University Press, 2014).

14. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza (New York: Zone Books, 1990); Spinoza: Practical Philosophy (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988).

15. Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Daniel Drake Smith (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1876).

16. Benedictus de Spinoza and R. H. M. Elwes, Improvement of the Understanding, Ethics, and Correspondence of Benedict De Spinoza (New York: M.W. Dunne, 1901).

17. Benedictus de Spinoza, The Ethics; Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect; Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1992).

18. Benedictus de Spinoza, A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994). For the purpose of my discussion I will use Curley's translation, which renders affectus as affect, but it should be clear that the precise term of use is an open question tied to the historical situation of the translator and those others engaging the terms.

19. Brian Massumi, “Notes on the Translation and Acknowledgements,” in A Thousand Plateaus, ed. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (London: Continuum, 1987), xvi.

20. On this method of historical analysis, see Peter Stearns and Carol Stearns, “Emotionology: Clarifying the History of Emotional Standards,” American Historical Review 90, issue 4 (1985): 813–36.

21. Benedict de Spinoza, Ethics, trans. Edwin Curley (London: Penguin Books, 1996), IIIP1.

22. Ibid., IIP29.

23. Ibid., IIP19.

24. Ibid., III Postulate 1; Postulate 2, P1.

25. Spinoza to Leibniz, in Benedict de Spinoza, Life, Correspondence, and Ethics (London: Trübner and Company, 1870), 363–65.

26. Spinoza to Oldenburg, ibid., 241–42.

27. Spinoza to Oldenburg, ibid., 253.

28. Spinoza to W. van Bleyenberg, ibid., 300.

29. Marjorie Levinson, “A Motion and a Spirit: Romancing Spinoza,” Studies in Romanticism 46, issue 4 (2007).

30. William Wordsworth, The Prelude or Growth of a Poet's Mind: An Autobiographical Poem (London: Edward Moxon, 1850), 49–50.

31. “Review of Leaves of Grass,” The Washington Daily National Intelligencer, February 18, 1855.

32. Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass (Philadelphia: David McKay, 1884), 148, 50.

33. Ibid., 370–71. Emphasis added.

34. Marx, The Machine in the Garden. For a similar discussion of the railroad in Europe, see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986).

35. Stearns, American Cool, 52.

36. Frederick A. Rauch, Psychology, or, a View of the Human Soul, 2d ed. (New York,: M. W. Dodd, 1841), 301.

37. Hugo Münsterberg, The Photoplay: A Psychological Study (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1916), 97.

38. Ibid., 130.

39. Wilhelm Wundt, Principles of Physiological Psychology (London: Macmillan, 1904), 5.

40. William James, Principles of Psychology (New York: H. Holt and Company, 1890), 185. Italics in original.

41. Edward Bradford Titchener, Lectures on the Experimental Psychology of the Thought Processes (New York: Macmillan Company, 1909), 23.

42. Solomon Gingerich, Wordsworth: A Study in Memory and Mysticism (Elkhart, IN: Menonite Publishing Company, 1908), 52.

43. Christian Ruckmich, “The Role of Kinaesthesis in the Perception of Rhythm,” The American Journal of Psychology 24, issue 3 (1913): 305–59. Ruckmick would change the spelling of his name from the more Germanic “Ruckmich” shortly after these early publications.

44. Christian Ruckmich, “The History and Status of Psychology in the United States,” The American Journal of Psychology 23, issue 4 (1912): 531.

45. Wendell Dysinger and Christian Ruckmick, The Emotional Responses of Children to the Motion Picture Situation (New York: The Macmillan Company, 1933), 59.

46. Christian Ruckmick, The Psychology of Feeling and Emotion (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1936), 42.

47. Christian Ruckmick to Walter B. Cannon, 9 July 1931. Box 131, Folder 1860, Walter Bradford Cannon Papers (H MS c40), Rare Books and Special Collections, Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, Boston, MA. For further discussion or Ruckmick's place in the history of media psychology, see Malin, Feeling Mediated.

48. Dysinger and Ruckmick, 119.

49. Ibid.

50. Christian Ruckmick, “How Do Motion Pictures Affect the Attitudes and Emotions of Children?: The Galvanic Technique Applied to the Motion Picture Situation,” Journal of Educational Psychology 6, issue 4 (1932): 210.

51. Otniel Dror, “The Scientific Image of Emotion: Experience and Technologies of Inscription,” Configurations 7, issue 3 (1999): 358.

52. Hugo Münsterberg, American Problems: From the Point of View of a Psychologist (New York: Moffat, Yard and Companry, 1910), 119.

53. Nicholas Carr, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 3.

54. Daniel Anderson et al., “Brain Imaging-an Introduction to a New Approach to Studying Media Processes and Effects,” Media Psychology 8, issue 1 (2006): 6.

55. Massumi, “Autonomy of Affect,” 85. Emphasis added.

56. Ibid., 86.

57. Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 139.

58. Carr, The Shallows.

59. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual, 139–40.

60. Steven Johnson, Everything Bad Is Good for You: How Today's Popular Culture Is Actually Making Us Smarter (New York: Riverhead Books, 2006).

61. Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Everyday Ideas: Socioliterary Experience among Antebellum New Englanders (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2006); Ronald Zboray and Mary Saracino Zboray, Literary Dollars and Social Sense: A People's History of the Mass Market Book (New York: Routledge, 2005).

62. Jenna Burrell, Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012).

63. Norbert Wiener, “Cybernetics,” Scientific American 129 (1948): 14.

64. Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 504.

65. Ann Cvetkovich, Mixed Feelings: Feminism, Mass Culture, and Victorian Sensationalism (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1992).

66. Sedgwick and Frank, “Shame in the Cybernetic Fold,” 512–14.

67. Ibid., 515.

68. Ibid., 516.

69. Ibid., 521.

70. Dysinger and Ruckmick, 80.

71. Massumi, Parables for the Virtual; Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003).

72. Teresa Brennan, The Transmission of Affect (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 75.

73. Nigel Thrift, Non-Representational Theory: Space, Politics, Affect (London: Routledge, 2008), 172.

74. Antonio Damasio, Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain (London: Penguin, 2005); Antonio Damasio, The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1999); Antonio Damasio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2003); Antonio Damasio, Self Comes to Mind : Constructing the Conscious Brain (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010).

75. Damasio, Descartes' Error, 208–09; Antonio Damasio, Daniel Tranel, and Hannah Damasio, “Somatic Markers and the Guidance of Behavior: Theory and Preliminary Testing,” in Frontal Lobe Function and Dysfunction, ed. Harvey Levin, Howard Eisenberg, and Arthur Lester Benton (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). For critiques of Damasio's approach to emotion see Malin, Feeling Mediated, and Gross.

76. John Cromby, “Feeling the Way: Qualitative Clinical Research and the Affective Turn,” Qualitative Research in Psychology 9, issue 1 (2011): 88–98. For a slightly different take on the place of ineffability in contemporary affect theory, see Steven Brown and Ian Tucker, “Eff the Ineffable,” in Gregg and Seigworth, The Affect Theory Reader.

77. Daniel Dennett, Content and Consciousness (New York & London: The Humanities Press & Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969); and Consciousness Explained (Boston: Little, Brown and Co., 1991).

78. Jerome Bruner, Acts of Meaning (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990), 32.

79. Joan Scott, “The Evidence of Experience,” Critical Inquiry 17, issue 4 (1991): 777.

80. Brennan, The Transmission of Affect, 3.

81. Ibid., 134 and passim.

82. Kathleen Stewart, Ordinary Affects (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 12.

83. William Uttal, The New Phrenology:The Limits of Localizing Cognitive Processes in the Brain (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001); William Uttal, Distributed Neural Systems: Beyond the New Phrenology (Cornwall-on-Hudson, NY: Sloan Pub., 2009); Kelly Joyce, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008).

84. Hans Jonas, “Parallelism and Complementarity: The Psycho-Physical Problem in Spinoza and in the Succession of Niels Bohr.” In Spinoza and the Sciences, ed. Marjorie Grene and Debra Nails (Boston, MA: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1986), 241.

85. Carolyn Marvin, When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988).

86. Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (New York: Routledge, 2004), 54.

87. Clough, “Introduction,” 2.