Abstract
Dierdra Reber’s Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture aims to trace the ways in which affect, feeling, and the language of emotion have become the dominant episteme in our contemporary world. Affect, according to Reber, has superseded the age of reason particularly in today’s “free-market democracy,” a term the author employs to underscore the inextricable relationship between free-market capitalism and liberal democracy. It is affect or feeling that moves us beyond rationality to regulate our response to the contemporary, post-Soviet world. To this end, Reber’s book contains a preface, a prelude, an introduction, while the bulk of the book is divided into two parts with a total of four chapters, and a conclusion.
As a timely scholarly intervention that seeks to bridge disciplinary gaps, Coming to Our Senses draws from theories and concepts ranging from philosophy, economics, psychology, biology, and sociology, among other fields. Four scholarly interventions from different fields are integral to the development of concepts Reber introduces in her study, namely, Raymond Williams’s structure of feelings, Antonio Damasio’s brain science of emotion, Kathleen Stewart’s ordinary affects, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s bodies without organs. Given that Reber aims to anchor her claim about the centrality of affect through a wide range of cultural texts (books, film, music, advertising, social media, cultural criticism, etc.) from both the United States and Latin America, this book can also be situated within hemispheric and affect studies.
Reber presents us with a number of key concepts that become integral to her overall argument, such as “epistemic affect” (p. xiv), “ill-being” as a neologism and counterpart to well-being (p. xvii), “capitalist homeostasis” (p. xxiii), and “feeling soma” (p. xiii), mixing interdisciplinary discourse to come up with new, critical language to name complex processes of how contemporary cultural, political, and social forms affect a collectivity. For instance, Reber employs “feeling soma” as “a model of human knowledge and action based on the conceptual framework of a body governed by moral standards, a morality defined on an emotional spectrum (positive is good, negative is bad). The feeling soma is heterogeneous and unified, bound together in the same principles of autonomic internal functioning that guide any living organism, with a premium on homeostasis and happiness as intrinsically and indissolubly unified conditions” (p. xiii). Throughout Coming to Our Senses, Reber draws an arc between the contemporary global (post-Soviet) moment and the age of revolution and the Enlightenment. While the age of revolution might have given rise to free-market democracy, it is only in the post-Soviet period that capitalism has gained undisputed hegemony.
At several points of the book, Reber also draws our attention to the centrality of affect and her concept of the “feeling soma” in relation to the metaphor of a headless body, which is to say that the head (or discernible figures of power) has been removed, thus leaving a body (as in a multitude, groups of people, or a network of multitudinous subjects) to reach affective homeostasis or self-organization and balance through collective feeling. Reber presents us with examples of how feeling soma operates globally in recent social movements such as the indignados in Spain, the Arab spring, or Occupy Wall Street.
Part 1 of Coming to Our Senses proposes the centrality of the collective “we” as a sentient subjectivity that has become prevalent in its mode of responding to affects emerging from every aspect of contemporary social and political life. Chapter 1 specifically addresses how the feeling soma interfaces with creation of a singular but collective subjectivity. Chapter 2 looks more closely at the ways in which the feeling soma responds to collective efforts in relation to questions of ecological sustainability. Part 2 of the book emphasizes the ways in which notions of well-being and ill-being are at constant interplay in social dynamics and interactions and how reaching homeostasis is integral to the feeling soma’s dynamism within a collective cultural subjectivity. Chapter 3 explores how the singular collective subject expresses its political conformity or dissent in terms of critical language of health (well-being) and disease (ill-being). Chapter 4 zooms-in on the ways in which the affective subject, through homeostasis, can find viable means of social and political action. In the conclusion, Reber underscores the centrality of affective epistemicity in relation to biopower to have a more full understanding of our cultural politics on a global scale.
While many of Reber’s claims might seem contentious to readers seeking “traditional” scholarship or more sustained attention to and analysis of specific case studies or cultural texts, the power of Reber’s contribution to both the humanities and the social sciences rests precisely on what one might call an undisciplined multidisciplinary intervention. Reber convincingly shows the centrality of affective discourse to our understanding of our political and social moment by deftly moving from critical to cultural text, from geographical site to another, or from the contemporary to the nineteenth or eighteenth century. Nonetheless, the author missed opportunities to engage with questions that beg to be answered, for instance, how there is shift from enlightenment (reason) toward romanticism and other artistic forms and movements that privilege affect and a constant renewal of aesthetic forms as sites from which to critique capitalism and the political body. Such an engagement would have proven particularly germane to the humanities and, specifically, literary studies. Yet, Reber’s intention is precisely to move away from the disciplinary constrictions of specific fields of inquiry and, instead, place in dialogue concepts from fields that are not usually brought together in the same scholarly work. The multiple examples and case studies Reber presents us with makes Coming to Our Senses a welcome and rich reading for a broad readership, particularly those interested in interdisciplinary work.