Abstract
In ‘Nietzsche, Genealogy, History’, Michel Foucault (1998[1971]: 370) notes that a genealogy requires ‘patience and a knowledge of details, and it depends on a vast accumulation of source material…. [It] demands relentless erudition’. Ruth Leys’s The Ascent of Affect: Genealogy and Critique is all of these things: patient, detailed, scholarly. It is extensively researched and her core arguments (for example, that too many affect theorists have detached affect from meaning; that some affect theorists have been too cavalier with empirical detail) are laid out in meticulous fashion. On the material in this book that I know best (the work of Paul Ekman, Brian Massumi, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, and Silvan Tomkins), it is clear that Leys has been exhaustive in her research. Her attention to Tomkins’s work is particularly notable as, at least in the critical humanities, this work has not yet been widely read and analysed. Most often Tomkins’s work is cited, secondarily, through the writing of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, who published an influential introduction to his affect theory in 1995 (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995). The four volumes of Tomkins’s master work (Tomkins, 1962, 1963, 1991, 1992) are sometimes difficult to read, and he published a large number of journal articles and chapters that partially overlap with these volumes, or that revise these volumes, or that present research on topics (such as smoking) that are new. Some of these publications report on empirical research; some are sociological or philosophical in orientation; others fuse theoretical arguments with biography. It is a daunting amount of material to read and digest (full disclosure here: I have recently finished writing an introductory book on Tomkins with Adam Frank (Frank and Wilson, forthcoming), and it took me years to become familiar with all this material). Leys has also visited the Tomkins archives (at the Drs. Nicholas and Dorothy Cummings Center for the History of Psychology at the University of Akron) and appears to have read letters between Tomkins and Paul Ekman that I thought were still under embargo (pp. 79–80, note 4). While the scope of The Ascent of Affect is circumscribed (it focuses on theories of emotion emerging from what Leys calls the Tomkins–Ekman paradigm of basic emotion), within that arena Leys has indeed been relentless.
On all these counts, I have no quarrel with Leys. I am impressed by the thoroughness of The Ascent of Affect. I do, however, have a number of significant reservations about the critical ambitions of the book, reservations that have left me with a sense that the book is not able to engage with some of the important methodological difficulties in the humanities literatures on affect (even though such an engagement is one of the objectives of The Ascent of Affect). In the interests of concision, I will approach these reservations through the question – signalled in Leys’s subtitle – of genealogy. The kind of genealogy that Foucault delineates, via Nietzsche, requires more than the accumulation of material. Foucault is concerned mostly with how an analysis drawn from such material would position itself in relation to conventional epistemological and political claims about truth, error, absence, chronology, linearity, utility, and identity. In this regard, Foucault’s genealogy has a core commitment: It ‘opposes itself to the search for “origins”’ (Foucault, 1998[1971]: 370). Leys adopts a different understanding of genealogy, one more akin to that given in the Oxford English Dictionary (‘an account of one’s descent from an ancestor or ancestors, by enumeration of the intermediate persons; a pedigree’). Moreover, her genealogy seems to be a synonym for history (on page 20, for example, the paragraph under the subheading ‘A Genealogy of Research on the Emotions’ begins, ‘In the following book, I offer a history of post-World War II theoretical and experimental approaches to the emotions’ [emphasis added]). The Ascent of Affect makes no claim to a Foucauldian methodology. Nor should it. My point is not that this book should be Foucauldian or Nietzschean. Rather, my concern is this: How forcefully can this book critique recent thinking about affect in the critical humanities given its methodological attachment to a conventional model of historical/epistemological origins? Much of the scholarship that is now gathered together in a rough and ready way under the rubric ‘the affective turn’ is closely aligned with modes of Foucauldianism or Nietzscheanism or Deleuzianism or Spinozism or Marxism or Freudianism or Derrideanism that take a critique of origins to be central to their analytic mission. Because The Ascent of Affect builds a conventional historical chronology about research on emotion, and because that chronology is anchored in, and authorized by, a seemingly stable origin (the Tomkins–Ekman paradigm of basic emotion), this book stands, ineffectually I suspect, outside the conceptual universe that it critiques. It is something of a paradox that The Ascent of Affect engages the ‘affective turn’ intensely, but in a way that leaves many of the critical problems in those literatures largely intact.
There are, of course, a number of ways to think about the history of theories of emotion. In the critical humanities literatures that I allude to here (following Foucault, or Freud, or Deleuze), there is one historical formulation that is used frequently to frame and define emotion. This is the idea that theories of emotion in the West can be divided into two intellectual traditions: on the one hand, the theories of emotion that begin, more or less, with Darwin, and, on the other hand, the theories of affect that begin, more or less, with Spinoza. The Darwinian tradition is said to be more empirical in orientation, and it thinks of emotion as a psychological and/or physiological event tied to individual experience. The work of Tomkins and Ekman is often said to be part of this tradition. The second, Spinozist, tradition thinks of affect as a more diffuse event: It is an impersonal force that pervades the social world, operative in both sub-individual and supra-individual registers. The work of Deleuze and Massumi is said to be part of this tradition. Like all attempts to neatly partition the world, this notion of two distinct traditions (and the corollary that contemporary theories of emotion can be located clearly in one or other of these lineages) doesn’t fare well when examined closely. For example, it has been common for researchers to claim that Tomkins’s work follows, builds on, expands, or revitalizes Darwin’s work in The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (Darwin, 1965[1872]). However, close attention to Tomkins’s writing shows that he frequently admonishes Darwin, and explicitly positions his own work against the expression model of emotion that Darwin deploys. The influence of Darwin on Tomkins is not as obvious as one might presume reading those literatures that like to divide theories of affect into two discrete traditions. Indeed, it might be a stronger working hypothesis to claim that Tomkins is more attached (positively and negatively) to Freud than to Darwin. Paul Ekman, on the other hand, explicitly aligns his work with Darwin: He is the editor of a widely circulated edition of The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals and a long-standing cultural warrior for bio-evolutionary theories of human behaviour. The consolidation, in The Ascent of Affect, of Tomkins’s and Ekman’s work into a single paradigm under-reads the differences between these theorists of emotion, and undervalues the different histories, methods, and critical ambitions at play in their work. How might we scramble, a little, the frames that have come to govern both critical and empirical work on emotion? Let me spell out how such an approach might work by returning to the question of genealogy.
Foucault gives three interrelated reasons for why a conventional history that seeks to establish an origin (for instance, the Tomkins–Ekman paradigm of basic emotion) is different from a genealogy. First, the conventional pursuit of historical origins ‘is an attempt to capture the exact essence of things…. [It] assumes the existence of immobile forms’ (Foucault 1998[1971]: 371). That is, the search for an origin is an attempt to secure and stabilize the material at hand, to make it self-same – an identity. This is what happens when The Ascent of Affect takes a highly complex body of work, like Tomkins’s, and treats those texts (written over four decades and in response to an extraordinarily diverse set of intellectual traditions: behaviourism, cognitivism, cybernetics, ethology, neurology, psychoanalysis) as a univocal theory, subject to unilateral determinations of meaning. Indeed, one of the primary ways that The Ascent of Affect apprehends Tomkins’s work is through an insistence on very clear divisions: that psychoanalysis and Tomkins’s affect theory are ‘radically different’ (pp. 27–8), for example, or that drives and affects are ‘completely separate systems’ (p. 29), or that there is a ‘radical dissociation’ (p. 34) between affect and cognition, or that affects and cognition are ‘inherently independent’ (p. 40) from each other. The reader who relies on The Ascent of Affect for their understanding of Tomkins will be robbed of the complexity of how affect and cognition (and drives and perceptions and memory and the face and socialization) co-assemble and disassemble in his work.
The Ascent of Affect reads complex systems of (conceptual, institutional, and discursive) differentiation in singular terms, as if these systems are composed primarily of clear-cut and static distinctions. These readings are often presented rhetorically as clarifications (what Tomkins really said; what Ekman’s comparative study of emotional responses in Japanese and American students really shows). However, these readings are also doing constitutive work for Leys: They congeal theories and texts into their ‘purest possibilities…their carefully protected identities’ (Foucault, 1998[1971]: 371). When the co-assembling aspects of Tomkins’s theory are subordinated to the distinctions that he draws between, say, affect and cognitions, what emerges is a predictably stable origin/identity: basic emotion. In this way, The Ascent of Affect doesn’t discover its object (basic emotion); it engineers it. To give another small but potent example of how these origins are established: In an extensive critique of an important paper that Tomkins co-authored with Robert McCarter in 1964, Leys decides early on that ‘when describing this paper I shall attribute the experiment and its findings only to Tomkins, who was the instigator and principal author of this study’ (p. 61). This minor gesture is exemplary of the way The Ascent of Affect renders authors and issues singular: By referring to ‘he’ not ‘them’ in the 9 or 10 pages of critique of the 1964 paper that follow, Leys reduces the authorship of the paper to a single point of origin, and this provides a frame within which Tomkins and McCarter’s account of primary affects can be transmogrified into a much more univocal theory of basic emotion.
Second, a conventional history, having established an origin, gives that origin an elevated status (it becomes solemn and ‘lofty’; Foucault, 1998[1971]: 372). One of the most important threads in The Ascent of Affect is the construction of a lineage of Basic Emotion Theory (initiated, Leys argues, by Tomkins and then exemplified in the work of Ekman). Leys argues that this Basic Emotion Theory has come to dominate research on emotion in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences (this is the ascent to which the title of the book refers). Most of the problems in current scholarship on emotion, she argues, can be traced to a paradigm that emerges in the post–World War II period, starting with Tomkins: ‘That new paradigm eventually displaced alternative ways of thinking about the emotions. Indeed, its success has been so great that today it informs the work not only of the majority of neuroscientists and psychologists but also, increasingly, that of literary critics and political theorists’ (p. 27). Adam Frank and I have argued elsewhere that there are non-trivial differences between the work of Tomkins and Ekman that put the claim for a coherent (let alone triumphant) lineage of emotion into doubt. Emotion in Ekman is often ‘basic’ in the way that Leys describes (‘a limited number of discrete emotions defined as pan-cultural or universal, inherited, and adaptive responses of the organism’; p. 33), but all this represents a deviation from Tomkins’s work, not an intensification of it (Frank and Wilson, 2012). For example, Tomkins uses the word ‘primary’ (rather than ‘basic’) to describe the affects, and there is a strong reading to be made that Tomkins may be most interested in highlighting the primacy of affects as motivators of human behaviour, rather than advocating, as Ekman does, for their universal nature. A second example: Leys places Charles Darwin in this basic emotion paradigm with Tomkins and Ekman – together, they constitute a ‘physiognomic tradition’ (p. 88), promulgating a ‘physiognomic ideology’ (p. 89). She argues that the use of photography in the work of all three authors (photographs of emotionally expressive faces, specifically) has the effect of generating a conceptually unsustainable distinction between genuine facial response (imagined to happen in states of solitude) and the artificial response required when posing for the camera (which tends to freeze an expression or feeling mid-flight). This ideology claims we can draw an absolute differentiation between the masks we allegedly put on for others and the genuine faces we have when we are alone and no one is watching…. It’s as if we were to imagine that we cannot find out the truth about people in the course of interacting with them in daily life. (p. 89)
Disregarding the differences within and between these authors, Leys merges Darwin, Tomkins, and Ekman into a homogeneous lineage, and then places that lineage centre stage in the historical narrative that unfolds across the pages of the book. This is a conventional grand narrative that has no interest in discursive or historical deviations. There are no ‘jolts…surprises…unsteady victories and unpalatable defeats’ (Foucault, 1998[1971]: 73). The Ascent of Affect is an argument for the rise and fall of a monolithic intellectual bloodline, even though the texts themselves indicate a more heterogenous set of discursive relations. Why does this matter? It is my feeling that one of the things holding back more challenging research on affect in the critical humanities is just this tendency to bifurcate the field into traditions or paradigms (Spinoza versus Darwin, Massumi versus Tomkins). Such bifurcations miss the traffic between texts in these supposedly distinct traditions, and they sideline other work (such as Aristotle, Cannon-Baird, Descartes, Freud, James, Klein, Marx) that has plenty to contribute to scholarship on affect (Leo, 2011). Leys’s elevation of a Basic Emotion Theory above all other discursive, empirical, and historical material homogenizes a field that urgently needs greater intellectual diversity.
The third way in which Foucault distinguished between conventional history and genealogy is that the origin becomes a site of truth in a conventional history. The Ascent of Affect is much more interested in correction and veracity than it is in the vicissitudes of interpretation. Specifically, it places most of its libido in the service of properly deployed empiricism, and sometimes this allegiance to empirical work becomes a kind of scientism. Leys’s critique of Massumi’s (1995) ‘The Autonomy of Affect’ is exemplary in this regard. She contests Massumi’s reading of two empirical experiments that, he argues, show the autonomy of affect from higher cognitive processes and systems of signification, and the intimacy of affect and the body. These interpretations are ‘rather opaque philosophical-speculative reflections’ (p. 315) that impose interpretations that are ‘seemingly unwarranted by the experimental results’ (p. 320). Massumi ‘willfully or otherwise misreads the data’ (p. 341) from these experiments, and along with others in the field of affect studies he is ‘poorly informed’ (p. 342) about the way these experiments have been constructed and where they fit into the scientific literature. To put this concisely, they are cherry-picking data to fit their philosophical inclinations.
The Ascent of Affect is interested not in disrupting scientific or empirical conventions, but rather in cleaving more closely to them. Leys’s advocacy for Alan Fridlund’s psychological research on emotion (‘in the field of emotion research there is no intellectually viable alternative to Fridlund’s position’; p. 368) takes the form of advocating for empirical business as usual. Unlike Massumi, Fridlund ‘backed up his arguments by exhaustively reviewing the extensive literature in the field, by reporting new experimental results, and by making critical reinterpretations of some of Ekman’s canonical experiments’ (pp. 238–9). Here it seems important to note that there are political and interpretive preferences on Leys’s side as well as Massumi’s. For example, Leys’s sharp critical eye entirely passes over what difficulties there may be in the conventional psychological methods on which Fridlund relies. In truth, my sympathies are pulled in (at least) two directions in relation to Leys’s critique of Massumi: I have strong critical attachments to the value of using and decomposing empirical data in ways not unlike those used by Massumi; at the same time, I am also partial to Leys’s desire for empirical work to be used carefully in terms of the philosophical, historical, and discursive parameters by which it was set up. It seems what is needed just as urgently as Massumi’s and Leys’s critiques is a method that refuses to choose between an attachment to the empirical and a decomposition of it (and here work in feminist science studies has been exemplary). When The Ascent of Affect asks us to cleave to the properly empirical and the truth it can deliver, it seems that the scope and conceptual possibilities of critical work on affect are being unnecessarily curtailed.
Genealogy under Foucault seeks the dissipation of its object: ‘It disturbs what was previously immobile; it fragments what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consistent with itself’ (Foucault, 1998[1971]: 375). Interestingly, Leys’s advocacy for the empirical work of Fridlund approaches such a dissipation. Fridlund, she argues, is happy to dispense with the concept of emotion: ‘He does not seek to explain “emotion” by appealing to hidden, internal mechanisms. Rather he is interested in understanding the trajectory of social encounters as they occur in ordinary, everyday life’ (p. 362). Fridlund’s approach, Leys argues, is ‘radically contextual and relational…context trumps everything else’ (p. 362). Notwithstanding a certain concern with the deployment of context as another origin (Derrida, 1982[1971]), it seems likely that there is plenty in this empirical work that could be of interest to scholars in the critical humanities. What does Fridlund’s anti-psychologism share with Massumi’s, for example? How do these various studies of emotion connect and detach and mutually inform each other? In what ways do these studies belong not to separate paradigms, but to an intellectual network of sometimes self-contradictory, sometimes complementary, and sometimes antagonistic claims? If Leys’s conclusions about Fridlund hadn’t been arrived at through such a strong commitment to identity, lineage, and the refutation of error, this could have been an opportunity for a conversation across the empirical and conceptual commitments that constitute affect studies. I am not advocating for a resolution between Leys and, say, Tomkins or Massumi (there are irresolvable tensions here), but I am frustrated that Leys’s genealogy and critique leave very little ground to be discussed, contested, or refigured. The Ascent of Affect seeks instead a capitulation of the Foucauldian, Deleuzian, Nietzschean, and Freudian traditions to a singular author: Fridlund. In the end, The Ascent of Affect has little to offer readers (like myself) who share some of Leys’s concerns about how Massumian readings have become all but monopolistic in humanities studies of affect, but who at the same time remain connected and committed to the kinds of critique and politics mobilized under the names of Foucault, Deleuze, Marx, Spinoza, Nietzsche, and Freud. The commitment to origin, linearity, and identity keeps The Ascent of Affect walled off from the compelling conversations about affect that I hope are still to come.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
