Abstract
This paper offers a critique of affect theory using the analytical concept of scale that is made concrete through an ethnography of Pentecostal Christianity and an exploration of current neuroscientific thinking. Affect theory is one recent form of a Western philosophical concern about the loss of agency in modernity, what I call “agency-anxiety.” Affect theorists tend to privilege the sense of freedom gained by immediate and individual experience over the constraints of more extended experiences and collectivity. That is, affect theory often scales its analysis tightly. This paper responds with an ethnography of Pentecostal practice and exploration of work in neuroscience that describes an analytic space in which broader scales can be useful as well. Ethnography scaled beyond the instant reveals that the Pentecostal ideal of surrendering to God in a moment of abandonment often results from a “fake it until you make it” approach; in other words, from extended, effortful, willful practice. This practice leads to the formation of habits and dispositions that allow the attainment of spontaneous rupture. Likewise, neuroscience can scale out its analysis by focusing on dispositions, moods and habits, rather than simply a more immediate view. Further, “scale effects” and emergent properties in scale-to-scale relations undermine reductionism. Finally, because Pentecostals are generally right wing yet also exemplify ruptural practice, it seems that outside of a particular conjuncture, the tightly scaled eruptive moment of affect is by no means per se a productive or (politically) progressive formation. As such, making scale an explicit analytical category might help us to see agency, change, and structure more clearly.
So much depends upon the scale through which we view the world. When the temporal frame is brief, for instance, an explosive moment may appear especially significant and transformative. Yet, if we broaden our frame outward, we likely find links to a story which surrounds an event: preparation, collaboration and the rippling movements of extended effects. A similar story might be told of spatial and social scales in addition to the temporal. In common parlance these expansions of the frame appear as something like context, which sounds quite mundane. In this paper, however, I argue that these are important analytical choices around the scale of analysis. Nathan Sayre defines scale as the grain and extent of a given study (2005). Sayre suggests that scale might be understood as the way a particular lens makes differently sized objects of inquiry discernible. Thus a shift in scale allows some elements to become visible and open to investigation, while others are obscured. This paper discusses practices of Pentecostal Christians as well as recent theories in neuroscience to suggest the importance of dynamically switching scales of analysis so as to explore both vigorous change and relatively static structure. This matters in part because the different patterns that emerge as we jump scales offer tools for thinking outside of linear logics.
For some, the tightest of scales where we easily experience rupture, spontaneity, and/or immediacy will feel like freedom. For instance, when a Pentecostal speaks in tongues they often describe their experience as if it came on spontaneously, with no preparation. Speaking in tongues can then be more easily imagined as outside the constraints of everyday life. Similarly, much of “affect theory” relies on immediate and unplanned bursts of feeling and power that might enable people to experience freedom from everyday patterning. This theory is built on a neuroscience that describes a powerful human subconscious uncontained by language or intention and thus unfettered by much of what we think of as social norms (Massumi, 1995). 1 These stories of Protestant and affective freedom fit nicely into a genealogy of Western philosophers searching for escape from totalizing visions of modernity. The most recent version describes ruptural breaks like Protestant renewal and affective upsurge as prime examples of what some call an “event” or moment of immediate transformation, or perhaps even as the exemplar for a liberatory philosophy or a new militant subject (Badiou, 2012). In other words, Pentecostal experience, affect theory, and the event all share an emphasis on the freeing power of immediacy and spontaneity.
Yet, here is the rub. When each of these stories is analyzed more thoroughly, it becomes clear that immediacy is not the only description possible, and not always the most useful. In fact, Pentecostal and Protestant rupture as well as the relationship between subconscious and conscious thought described in affect theory may also be understood as the result of extended learning followed by retrospective solidification and analysis. Pentecostal tongues usually develop through some kind of preparation. Even the most explosive affect is embedded within broader dispositions and, more generally, eruptive moments of liberation often require extended effort. In other words, changing the scale of the analysis provokes a very different story.
A general emphasis on immediacy as opposed to preparation or its extended effects might be understood as a Western response to anxiety about the seeming lack of human agency in modern life. Philosophers from Immanuel Kant to Brian Massumi share the concern that society, especially modern bureaucratic communities, reduce individual capacities to affect the world. I use the term “agency-anxiety” to describe this agency-related worry.
Pentecostals feel agency-anxiety as well, only they invert the worry. They suggest that modern people imagine too much agency instead of too little, too much of a sense that humans can transform the world regardless of God. Pentecostals then quickly find themselves caught between their own worries and the secular reversals of these concerns. Their surrender to God can be critiqued as simply yielding to passions or preachers (Frank, 2004). Or, by contrast, they might be honored for modeling freedom outside the bounds of modern control (Brown, 1966; de Certeau, 1996; Haraway, 1991). Both of these stories rely on something that feels like spontaneous expression. Yet, from the perspective of an ethnographer who studies the training of Pentecostal missionaries, these seemingly spontaneous ruptures clearly result from a process of cultivating capacities and dispositions (Brahinsky, 2013). This simple shift in perspective unsettles the whole story. Instead of slavery to passionate rupture, or resistance to modern gridding, Pentecostal discontinuity can be seen on a broader temporal scale as part of a process, a pilgrimage, even a habitual structure. In other words, scale seems to make all the difference.
Scale also matters in neuroscience, especially the neuroscience that underpins affect theory. For instance, Benjamin Libet’s work (1999), which is central to Brian Massumi’s deeply influential first swipe at affect scholarship (1995), is scaled quite tightly. Libet tracks events occurring within one-half of a second, and his studies suggest that what appears to us as consciousness is actually controlled by rapidly acting unconscious forces that set their own agenda. These forces act before conscious thought, before language is developed to explain them, and perhaps before society has its say in their formation.
Massumi describes affect as kin to this unconscious force and thus open and mobile when compared to Libet’s portrayal of consciousness. Massumi then opposes the freedom of affect to what he calls “emotion,” which he sees as structured by language and exhibiting the ills of contemporary disciplinary structures (Massumi, 1995). Affect, by contrast, suggests something akin to Montaigne’s noble savages, free because they have not yet encountered society’s norms. Without these constraints, one’s sense of possibility may be expansive. For Massumi, for example, this signals “nothing less than the perception of one’s own vitality, one’s sense of aliveness, of changeability (often signified as freedom)” (Massumi, 2002: 36).
However, as with Pentecostal practices, there are other ways to look at the neuroscience of affect and emotion. When neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio explore scales of time broader than a half-second, they no longer emphasize Libet’s moment of discontinuity between the conscious and the unconscious. Instead, they see an extended development of dispositions, moods, and habits that might enable that half-second dynamic (Damasio, 2010). In other words, discontinuity can be the result of a carefully nurtured capacity. Further, when neuroscientific events are reframed as extended dispositions, the lines between linguistically mediated emotion and Massumi’s affect become difficult to draw, perhaps even untenable. The affect/emotion divide so central to affect theory is most relevant in one—useful, but limited—scale of analysis. In other words, Pentecostal practice and recent neuroscience both demonstrate the importance of recognizing multiple scales of analysis. 2
Thus, the argument here is uncomplicated: scale matters to contemporary social theory, and to affect theory in particular. What scholars may find compelling depends, to some degree, on the scale with which we observe. While awareness of scale is certainly not new to social science, I argue that the implications of scale reach beyond simply recognizing that micro and macro views differ. 3 It appears that switching scales can transform fundamental logics in such a way that a system can no longer be reduced to a singular process or pattern. That is to say, scales that emphasize individuals, groups, events, or pilgrimages can each function differently and their relationship is not necessarily linear. This recognition of “scale effects” (Zylinska, 2014)—essentially, that different scales may provide altogether different logics—has not migrated easily from the hard sciences to the social sciences and may be a useful addition to the anthropological literature. Further, much of the anthropological literature is constructed in terms of a binary contrast between tightly and loosely scaled analyses, which makes it difficult to see the dynamic synergies and habitual patterns that emerge between, for instance, structured training and immediacy. Finally, the fact that Pentecostals are mostly right wing and yet immersed in a story of immediate rupture poses a challenge to any argument that immediacy per se signals a liberatory project.
This paper traces and thickens patterns that repeat in different contexts—Pentecostal, Western philosophical, and neurological. In each of these sites the choice of scale matters, and also immediacy and structure sometimes appear to be complementary. From this exploration we notice the importance of scale effects, the uncertain politics of scale, and the middle zone of agency that might reside in the habits that link immediacy to structure. This means that in any given context, we need to carefully analyze the crucial agents for change. Are they singular moments, deeply sedimented sensibilities, or perhaps something in between? More simply: how do we scale our analysis?
Pentecostalism
In this paper, I take up with Pentecostal practice—a form of evangelical Christianity. I am especially interested in its apparent immediacy but easily unearthed cultivation. For Pentecostals, temporal scale is central. True to their Protestant heritage, Pentecostals emphasize the immediate moment of rupture and transformation. These manifest most clearly in deeply emotional prayer practices that may involve speaking in tongues or faith healings. Both of these practices are felt to come immediately from on high, and seem perfectly suited to the claim that transformation relies on a discontinuity (Robbins, 2003) that is best grasped by the most immediate of phenomenological analyses (Csordas 2004). Yet in spite of initial appearances, a close look at the Pentecostal model for agency actually challenges contemporary theorists who see change as merely immediate rupture (Brahinsky, 2012, 2013). Instead, in Pentecostal practice, rupture and extended training compete for dominance, depending upon the scale we use to assess them. Further, since Pentecostals have been quite effective at spreading this practice, growing from a few thousand adherents at their emergence around 1900 to over 500 million followers by the close of the 20th century, (Anderson, 2010) their model seems effective and thus useful to think with.
Additionally, being both systematic builders of a structure for training acolytes and by and large politically right-wing, Pentecostals challenge the simplicity of uniscalar analyses, and they make us think carefully about the politics of choosing particular scales and weaken the unspoken assumptions about the relationship between scale and liberatory affect that permeate much of affect theory. Simply put, as Pentecostals emphasize the ruptural nature of their practice within the context of a deeply conservative politics, they challenge the easy equation of immediate rupture with political transformation. In an affect theory largely premised upon this calculus, scale becomes an important question. It appears that Pentecostal practice challenges the assumption that affect provides a politics outside of a specific conflict.
In fact, the Pentecostal capacity to change the world that they have logged onto seems to peak at some site of tension on the continuum between relatively static repetitions (traditionally viewed as ritual, habit, and structure) and immediate flashes of the discontinuous (often posed as rupture transformation and agency). The height of this middling form of agency manifests when explosive energies circulate within a dispositional pattern, as people train and sediment their ruptural capacities. In other words, with Pentecostals we find the capacity to change most consequentially in the middle zone: a site of repetition, learning, and sedimentation where moods, dispositions, habits and impulses are made, remembered and repeated. Here, when viewed from a given scale, patterns gain consistency, structure, and stability, as well as power.
Agency-anxiety: Modern
In this next section I trace a thread of concern about agency that has had tremendous impact on modern Western philosophy. I find it striking that this worry shows itself across a wide range of thinkers, many of whom agree about little else. Liberal thinkers, poststructuralists and others, share the desire for freedom from determinism although they approach solutions very differently. For some, their distinct analysis relies upon an emphasis on one scale of analysis over another.
Many a modern philosopher (and many an anthropologist) has expressed concern over the lack of freedom and agency within modernity. Kant, for instance, was preoccupied by the concern that things could obstruct human actions—but the concern only expanded from there. As Isaiah Berlin explains, “This problem, [the worry over individual agency] although it was particularly acute for Kant, has dominated European thought, and indeed to some extent European action, ever since. It is a problem which obsesses both philosophers and historians in the 19th century and, indeed, in our own century too” (Berlin, 1999:74) In what is necessarily a highly condensed history of Western philosophy, this paper will now expand the phenomenology of modern secularism (i.e. Taylor, 2007). I trace the agency-anxiety motivating much of Western philosophy, from Kant’s fear of outside influence (what he called “heteronomy”) to Brian Massumi’s hope for an affect that resists determination.
While perhaps “we have never been modern,” or genuinely free from nature’s determination, many are deeply stricken by its frustration (Latour, 1993). Agency-anxiety inspires the project of purification. The nature–culture divide is thus not simply a philosophical proposition. It also references a growing terror at the sense that while modernity asserted increased human creativity and control, that same ability to shape our environment swallowed itself and the rest of us in the mechanics of modern social life. The distance between creative potential and cultural constraint has been measured as rationalization or discipline, and experienced as alienation, a lack of genuine experience, or objectification. Modern agency-anxiety thus manifests in two distinct questions. 4 First, are we simply determined by an endless regression of causes? And second, how much does society control us? The latter is the question peculiar to moderns. As the growing “immanent frame” made it increasingly difficult to avoid asking if we were simply a collection of mechanical effects, modern philosophers replied by positing consciousness, emotions, or fleeting moments as beyond causal chains or social control matrices.
One common response evoked consciousness. As Michael Gillespie explains, “Western thought from Rousseau to Kant to Hegel” suggested that “consciousness” inspired liberation from the tyranny of nature, tradition, and passions (1984: 27) Think, step outside the grid, and view the world reasonably. Kant, for instance, finds safety in transcendent unaffectable reason (Kant, 1955). Freud’s suggestion that resistance to cultural repression comes through deeper self-reflexivity might be the ultimate in autonomous self-consciousness. Here self-conscious authenticity provides a kind of knowledge, “altogether independent of experience, and even of sensuous impressions” (Gillespie, 1984: 59). Exteriority is thereby disavowed.
A second, more explicitly resistant version of the effort to escape modern objectification comes packaged as “primitive” or sensual subjectivity. Rousseau’s critique of the dehumanizing effects of property is an early example, although it is the postmodern version of this project that is embraced by affect studies that will concern us most (Rousseau, 1983). Rousseau had followed Montaigne in promoting the pre-modern noble savage. In a similar vein, Nietzsche’s Apollonian vision, the romantics, the neovitalists, and—also quite relevant to our discussion—the evangelicals, all chose a space of freedom through emotion.
Others rescale the consequential questions so as to curtail determinism. Kierkegard’s “that individual” or Husserl’s phenomenological aspirations at pre-objective sensual reality both shrink their analytic lens to find an immediate underlying experience and bypass the process of objectification (Husserl, 1962; Kierkegaard et al., 1944). A final set of modern responses aims for deeper entanglement, as opposed to the liberatory distance of either Kantian or affective spaces of freedom. Best known through Hegel, Marx, and Heidegger, this tradition of agency anxiety describes the modern abstraction of concrete life, the decontextualization of social relations, and the alienation of people from their creativity as engendering a lack of agency and increased violence.
Agency-anxiety: Postmodern
Postmodern versions of agency-anxiety emphasize the denial of individual consciousness. By rejecting Freud’s repressive hypothesis and arguing that sexuality emerges as an effect of power, Foucault eliminated the conscious self as a potential outside to modern culture. Consciousness was now an internal part of the process, immanent to structures of power. However, the dominance of Foucauldian thinking in past years has inspired a scramble to find a gap, or space, in this disciplinary grid, some opening for agency (Morris and Spivak, 2010: 11–12). Reams of critique described the dearth of agency in early post-structuralist thought. Foucault himself eventually applied “self-fashioning” to remedy this problem (Foucault et al., 1988).
The response to this increasing agency-anxiety was, in some sense, brilliant. In exploring structures of mathematics, language, and society, scholars paralleled Gödel’s uncertainty theorem, which argued for the incompatibility of both coherence and completeness in any analysis (Livingston, 2012). Any coherently gridded analysis would, of necessity, be left incomplete, and anything complete could not help but be a bit incoherent. In other words, perhaps the deterministic totalizing that Foucault seemed to suggest was literally impossible. Judith Butler, for instance, describes the uncertainty of linguistic iteration, in which each re-speaking of an object cannot help but subtly misspeak, and its new history makes sameness impossible. Here, “agency is the hiatus in iterability, the compulsion to install an identity through repetition, which requires the very contingency, the undetermined interval, that identity instantly seeks to foreclose” (Butler, 1993). From Butler’s perspective, a chain of causality would lack the coherence necessary to turn us all into robot-effects of the panopticon. The linear reductionism necessary for determinism is thus lost in the uncertainty of semiotic repetition. Likewise, Badiou’s void at the edge of formalism, Derrida’s trace, Lacan’s Real, even Schmitt’s exception, all offer a version of Gödel’s theorem: there is no coherence if complete, and no completion if coherent (Badiou, 2005; Derrida, 1976; Lacan, 1999; Livingston, 2012; Schmitt, 1985). Another group of theorists allowed the gaps to emerge between broader modes of existence instead of individual actions (Bourdieu, 1989; Deleuze et al., 1994; Latour, 2013). That imagined that gap between coherent and incoherent, between complete and incomplete, might provide the space for affect, for the event, for hope, and for resistance.
Another important channel of postmodern theory followed Rousseau’s impulse toward an originary vitality, and argued that either bodies, vital energies, or the aesthetic impulses engendered by art could escape the mechanical gridding of modernity. This strategy played hundreds of times throughout the 20th century in art, poetry, free jazz, philosophy and politics as we see modernists escape the rational with the irrational, Picasso borrow from African influences, and others explore the liberatory effects of blank canvases. Brian Massumi’s earliest affect theory is an influential version of these. (His later work does retract some of his early celebration of the isolated event.) Thus, until recently, affect theory responded to the seemingly stultifying effects of structure with escape, the event, or the rupture. And, importantly, a primary version of escape has been to scale the question micro, through a small enough temporal lens to allow explosions to appear without their prefiguration, cultivation or post-evental consolidation. As Katie Stewart describes in Ordinary Affects, the emphasis on “something that throws itself together in a moment, an event and a sensation” is in direct reply to “the notion of a totalized system, of which everything is always already somehow a part.” Events, for Stewart, assuage the agency-anxiety produced by modern systematic thinking and experience. While Stewart does quite explicitly play with various scales and repetition, the gist of evental escape predominates (Stewart, 2007: 1, 7).
Yet, Stewart also participates in a thread in which this story of evental rupture is increasingly contested. Feminist affect theorists, in particular, have transformed both the object and the method of affect studies to encompass more muddle and to offer what is often an implicit nod toward broader scales. Their work stretches the notion of affect beyond that of an underlying primordial soup exploding into immediate liberatory practice to include analyses of affect as mundane, painful, or slowly sedimented. I am thinking most immediately of Lauren Berlant, Jasbir Puar, and Sianne Ngai (Berlant, 2011; Ngai, 2005; Puar, 2007). Here the sadness, pain, and trauma of affect studies is regularly described as sedimented and layered. Thus, the consequential scale is not immediate rupture, but rather a mood or disposition—and this is key. Perhaps pain and suffering more easily take the form of a more structured and sticky process. Scholars of negative affect are thus freed up to think on multiple scales. For instance, they can challenge single scalar narratives of affect that are outside of narrative structure (Grossberg, 1992: 81). For while in a given moment, affect might be beyond words and be irreducible to any semiotic form, the singular moment of expression is only one way to read the relationship between language and affect. Ngai makes this explicit by challenging the stark divide between affect and emotion, and suggesting instead “a modal difference of intensity or degree, rather than a formal difference of quality or kind” (2005: 5, 27). Perhaps because they are less invested in the need to find liberation through affect, scholars of negative affect often think more broadly. Ngai, for instance, also easily recognizes the multiple directions affect can play in politics.
Yet, the dominant thread of affect thinking still resonates closely with contemporary evental theories (i.e. Badiou, 2012, 2005) and relies on affect’s evasive capacities. Three days at the Affect Theory conference of October 2015 5 made it clear that current affect theory is, to a large degree, divided between a prevailing approach in which a powerful agency-anxiety plays out in hopeful stories of explosive affect and, on the other hand, an approach in which the morose, the paradoxical, and the awkward are portrayed at a far more extended scale. I found myself convinced that explicitly recognizing these scalar contests could serve to open the conversation further and perhaps illuminate the multiple forms of affect that now populate affect theory.
Pentecostals invert agency anxiety
Pentecostals have their own theoretical debates, but often invert the Western anxiety about too little agency, worrying instead that modern people imagine themselves as too agentive and not deeply enough yielded to God’s plan. This concern sat front and center within the missionary training I witnessed during fieldwork. I spent several years, between 2009 and 2014, with missionaries who were training within the Assemblies of God (AG), the largest Pentecostal formation in the world, currently involving about 67 million participants. In this paper, I look to AG’s archive to explore their particular reversal of agency-anxiety.
My favorite example comes from a 1949 AG revival, which, in this case, might have been polite language for a revolt. Revival/revolt was actually encouraged to some degree within AG, and small rebellions sprouted up almost every summer from its inception in 1914 onward. However, the “Latter Rain Revival” was the first AG revival in decades to reach across multiple states and inspire thousands of people. The rebels argued that AG ministers had been tightly controlling access to the Holy Spirit. People needed a more direct connection with God, and should take it. Thousands split off and formed their own networks, churches, and journals, and let the Spirit move them—they drew a strong response. AG’s General Council denounced the revivalists for excessive faith in the potential for human influence on spirituality, and spoke against “the extreme teaching as advocated by the ‘New Order’ [the revival] regarding the confession of sin to man and deliverance.” Revivalists, they thought, had claimed “prerogatives to human agency which belong only to Christ” (Menzies, 1971: 325). AG’s agency-anxiety condemned overt efforts by people to actively fashion their spiritual world.
In Pentecostal lore, the Western approach to human agency—in which individuals actively try and then succeed, or fail—is not only dangerous, but bound to be mistaken. Appearing in a 1944 issue of the Pentecostal Evangel (AG’s monthly newsletter), F. M. Bellsmith’s “Conquering a Bad Temper” describes the preacher with a temper who tries to sweep clean his soul, apparently a bit too actively. His is a dirt floor, and sweeping manifests only a growing cloud of dust. “You see the mistake the preacher had made: He was trying to sweep his own heart clean.” Instead, he must let God do the work for him—I will cleanse thee.” 6 Pentecostals here invert the Western concern that modern humans lack the capacity to effect the world, and instead worry that we envision too much impact. The 1936 “Words of Counsel from Daddy Welch” said it succinctly: “Never neglect the cultivation of every talent you have, but keep them under the Blood, on the altar, and consecrated to God.” There is but one anxiety. “The only danger is when natural talents cause one to be self-reliant [emphasis added].” Instead, “rely on the power of the Spirit always and let Him use you.” 7
Pentecostals actually find themselves caught between Western and Pentecostal concerns about agency, which is especially visible in representations of Pentecostals from outside their community. Donna Haraway, for instance, called for “a feminist speaking in tongues to strike fear into the circuits” of the New Right and did more than simply appropriate tongues for the left (1991: 181). She also joined a genealogy of progressives for whom tongues signified a transgressive cultural politics and freedom from constraint. Gloria Anzaldua’s Chicana women “speak in tongues like the outcaste and the insane,” as a revolt (Moraga and Anzaldúa, 1983: 165). In Gyn/Ecology Mary Daly proposes “speaking with tongues of fire” as resistance to phallocentric speech and ways of knowing (1998). And even earlier, Norman O. Brown advocates for a homologous, if less feminist, channel for transgression. For Brown, the chaos of tongues might model liberation. He asks his readers to imagine with him: “Pentecostal freedom, Pentecostal fusion. Speaking with tongues; many tongues, many meanings… The Babylonian confusion of tongues redeemed in the Pentecostal fusion” (Brown, 1966: 38). Brown aims to unleash the erotic, the irrational, and the chaos of spirit against the constraint of the disciplinary society. It is classic agency-anxiety.
More recently, evangelicalism’s exceptional organizing success inspired movement philosophers who hope for resistance to hegemonic norms via affect, the event, or other ruptural political practice. Michel de Certeau’s ideal of glossolalia (speaking in tongues) as a “vocal utopia”—uncaught by rationality, untrained, and spontaneously applied with no particular trajectory (Certeau, 1996)—resonates perfectly with the increasing valorization of the spontaneous event as a militant ideal (Badiou, 2012). In this vein Alain Badiou, Slavoj Zizek, and Giorgio Agamben all have written books built centrally upon the rupture of Paul’s conversion, which they clearly find stimulating. Badiou goes so far as to call it a new model for radicalism (Agamben, 2005; Badiou, 2005; Žižek, 2003). So we see, from Brown to Haraway to Agamben, the ruptures of conversion and speaking in tongues exemplify a moment of freedom. These scholars share a vision of religious practitioners as irrational, and therefore as subversives who incite a freedom that responds to Western agency-anxiety by escaping modern discipline.
On the other hand, the same explosive passion can be described as irrational and atavistic, which is to say, conservative. Critics of right-wing movements regularly pose reason against the irrational and see Pentecostals as exemplars of a poverty-stricken atavistic emotionalism, which in the 1900s was derided as “enthusiasm.” To be clear, while not all Pentecostal congregations lean to the right, the vast majority of Pentecostal politics at this current conjuncture involve something akin to the Christian Right’s economic and social agenda in the US. As a result, the link between religious practice and irrational political choices is a constant theme for critics. From H. L. Mencken to Richard Hofstader and Thomas Frank (Frank, 2004; Hofstadter, 1965) the political right is imagined as irrational, out of sync with their working-class economic interests, and therefore unwelcome in the liberal schema that requires both religion and feeling to remain cloistered in either the internal sublime, or overarching transcendent—and simultaneously disconnected from the everyday practice of human encounter or the conscious working of a reasonable polity. Perhaps the best-known example of this critique is Frank’s question: “What's the matter with Kansas?” (Frank, 2004)—a provocative means of asking: “Why do poor whites vote for Republicans who shift resources to the wealthy and destroy the welfare state that the poor rely upon?” Regardless of the empirical basis for the question—as either irrational resistance to the modern grid or irrational submission to their atavistic passions—agency-anxiety plays strongly in stories of the Pentecostals.
Rebuttals proliferate, countering both revolutionary and atavistic portrayals of Pentecostal irrationality while suggesting that there need not be an emotion/reason divide. Why should economic reason override one’s emotional value system (Moreton, 2007)? Pentecostals do choose to go to church and to be interpellated into the control system there—is that not rational? My own response emerges from fieldwork and over 150 interviews of Pentecostals who experienced “Gifts of the Spirit” like speaking in tongues. At first, nearly all of my informants explained that their experience was spontaneous and immediate. However, they also generally explained that they had initially faked their trance experience. 8 “[There was] pressure to speak in tongues,” explained Dr. Espinosa, a professor of theology at a Pentecostal university. “Social pressure: it’s what all the cool kids do. You want to be on fire for the Lord. That was the controlling message.” The fake it ’til you make it ethos seemed common sense to most self-reflexive descriptions of their experience, although in retrospect, many denied it. Later I found AG training manuals that explained in great detail exactly how to teach people to release their tongues and let the spirit move them. These texts encouraged pastors to tell participants “you might feel a tension in your tongue.” Pastors then “encourage [participants] to… open their mouth and release the language” (Cramer, 2008: 47). Such work is quite active, and “takes a bold, deliberate step” (Huffman and Lindell, 2006: 8). The focus of action is also very much on yielding, for “only Jesus can baptize someone in the Holy Spirit, so relax” (Enloe, 2008: 27). Yet I could find only one Pentecostal scholar accepting the proposition that Pentecostal practice might somehow be construed as something other than immediate agency from on high—that it might also include an element of ritualized practice (Albrecht, 1999). By noticing that faking it can be part of learning, and that training manuals actually called for this, I had unwittingly entered into a high-stakes debate within Pentecostalism. Spontaneity was key to their sense of God’s intervention. Otherwise, the processes seemed too modern, too systematic, and too human-centered. The upshot, however, was that I needed to rescale elements of my analysis, and notice that explosive rupture and deep irrationality may show immediacy and discontinuity, but they are also easily refigured as part of a systematic, highly planned process of discipline and training. Both scales matter. Perhaps habitual practices of transformation enable participants to develop dispositions, moods, and habits which include the capacity to enter into trance states and to experience ruptural change?
Agency, repetition, affect, and the brain
I soon found a parallel conversation within neuroscience and the philosophy of science in which temporal scale plays a tremendous role. Here, studies of habits, moods and dispositions tell one story, while immediate moments of action and control suggest a very different tale. These studies also demonstrate that previously strong lines separating linguistically inflected emotion from a more visceral and less constrained affect are difficult to hold onto. In other words, neuroscience, cultural studies, and Pentecostal practice all share the potential to make visible the effects of scale.
The more positive affect theories, like much agency-anxiety ridden philosophy, have often tried to uncover a modicum of freedom from the seeming determinism of contemporary neuroscience. To do so, they invert the classic psychodynamic perspective in which unconscious forces disrupt and distort consciousness in the service of basic needs. Instead, in these affect theories, the deeper energies still disrupt; however, they disrupt the control mechanisms of modern society instead of our reasonable selves. Brian Massumi’s early piece, “The Autonomy of Affect” is probably the most cited version of this tale. Massumi relies on Benjamin Libet’s neuroscience, which shows that the conscious impulse to move a finger is preceded by a neurological activity that Libet calls a “readiness potential” (RP). For Libet, once RP has engaged, the motion might be stopped; but without RP, there is no motion. He suggests, in other words, that all seemingly conscious moments of choice might actually serve a false, after-the-fact process of rationalizing an action already set in motion by unconscious neurological activity. Further, maybe consciousness acts only as constraint. 9 Libet’s experiments have been corroborated over the intervening years.
Libet’s work seems to confirm Massumi’s sense that consciousness and language are two elements of fixity that constrain the fluidity of a deeper affective possibility. Because consciousness is limited to constraining an already active RP, Massumi imagines consciousness as primarily controlling and not especially generative. Language also plays the part of structure for Massumi. As Massumi writes, “for structure is the place where nothing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefigured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules” (1995: 87). Given such a powerful sense of immobility, the pressure to find something outside of structure makes sense.
Massumi responds by positing a force outside of the grid: what he, following Deleuze, calls “affect.” 10 Massumi carefully differentiates between affect and emotion in this schema, because only the former escapes control. In his ontology, emotion is linguistically curtailed, while affect is a pre-linguistic charge or energy which cannot be named. Emotion thus becomes a “socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience” which is “qualified,” “conventional,” and “consensual.” Emotion here sits very much in the realm of social control, control by language. It involves “semantically and semiotically formed progressions” which form “narrativizable action-reaction circuits” and are thus “owned and recognized.” Affect, by contrast, is “pre-linguistic” and thus “unqualified,” not “ownable or recognizable” and therefore “resistant to critique” and “unassimilable.” Affect becomes the “new” or the agentive, as it is not yet caught in the constricting structures of words (Massumi, 1995). Affect, in this story, becomes freedom, resistance to structure, to gridding, prefiguration, as well as settling. It does not suggest a personal autonomous agent, but rather waves of possibility—perhaps a postmodern response to both neurological determinism and the agency-anxiety of the West. Meanwhile, the gridding of emotion via language places it closer to structure than to agency.
Affect and emotion
This affect/emotion split is staked around a fundamental access to freedom, or as Antonio Negri puts it bluntly, the “power of freedom, of ontological opening” (1999: 85–86). Language, in this scenario, permeates emotion, making it into a relatively static structure. Affect, by contrast, exhibits the qualities of contingency and escape. It turns out, however, that both cultural studies and neuroscience include tremendous disagreement about the significance and location of this divide. In cultural studies, the debate pivots around the relationships between language and bodies. For neuroscientists and philosophers of science, the question circulates around the extent to which our subconscious brain is molded by practice or language, and the relative autonomy of various parts of the brain (i.e. Damasio, 1994).
In cultural studies, the body/language divide points in multiple directions. Some see language as more stable than emotion or bodies (de Certeau, 2011; Keane, 2007). Perhaps, with its multitude of rules and relatively fixed shapes, language suggests more structure than the deepest visceral possibilities. However, by contrast, an impressive genealogy of authors also argues that language is nowhere nearly as fixed or thick as it might seem (Butler, 1993; Kristeva, 1980). Both Butler’s gap theory, and Kristeva’s suggestion that the visceral is linguistically framed and the site for indeterminacy and resistance, push against dualisms of structured language-ridden emotion and unstructured affect. On the other side of the pole, Marcel Mauss and others working within the history of the senses have demonstrated that bodies also are far more changeable than previously thought (Mauss, 1979). In other words, claims comparing the structuring work of bodies and words offer multiple answers. What becomes apparent here is that in spite of Massumi’s absolutely beautiful and sophisticated efforts to undo all sorts of enlightenment dualisms, he may retain one striking polarity, that of language/feeling. However, I would argue both sides of the coin: language is not so static, and affect is not so fluid.
In fact, broadly scaled analyses of neuroscience also contest this affect/language divide when they show affect deeply entangled with the outside world. Most obviously, neuroscientists who emphasize a holistic relationship between various parts of the brain involved in the processing of emotions find it difficult to see affect and emotion founded in separate physiological sites. Damasio (1994), for instance, suggests that reason and emotion are intertwined to the point that damage to emotional processing areas in the brain impairs rational decision making. Others simply expand the scale of analysis to emphasize dispositions, moods and habits—finding that the deepest of seemingly unconscious seas are, in fact, richly entangled with the nurturing and structuring effects of everyday living, and thus also dependent upon the linguistic figuring that molds much of our lives.
Previously, the story has gone roughly like this: we know the “lizard brain” is relatively fixed compared to other areas; it seems a conservative and relatively independent site of structure. This is the tale underpinning the affect-neuroscience conjuncture. Yet, in more recent work that extends the scale of analysis, even these deep primeval systems appear entangled with other brain areas as well as with their context, which has for a few millennia included communication and, even more specifically, language. Emotion also is an “inescapable, pervasive dimension of brain activity” (Columbetti, 2014: 64). In other words, when scaled out, language becomes a part of the process, and the distinctions between feeling and language appear less critical. Further, the agency found in single moments of cognition, emotion, or action might be far less significant than the repeatedly generated impulses of lasting creations like dispositions, moods or habits.
A second challenge to the affect-emotion divide emerges from a close examination of scale in neuroscience. On first read, neuroscientists often seem attached to a determinism grounded in immediacy. A recent collection, The New Unconscious, builds a pretty straightforward case that free will is likely an “illusion” (Uleman, 2005: 10)—for the “wellsprings of behavior appear to be opaque to conscious access.” They cite, for instance, the “chameleon effect,” where we mimic unconsciously (Phelps, 2005: 38–39), as well as the power of all sorts of subliminal priming in transforming responses. If a concept is activated subliminally through sound or sight, people can immediately act with more cooperation, rudeness, or slowness. Even more telling, Weger shows that folks misattribute their will to act, when in fact they have willed one thing, but the programmed bias of the computer cursor acts differently. They recalibrate their sense of will so as to fit with the action they observe. In other words, if will and causation often seem quite dissociated, that is perhaps because we are slaves to our neurological patterns. The New Unconscious is also full of stories of automaticity as the foundation for determinism—automatic systems of social judgment and behavior, automatic categorizing, evaluating, goal seeking, and achieving. As such, the precognitive, presemiotic subconscious is the primary agent. However—and this is the key to my argument—even here in the halls of determinism, the essays that do explore extended timescales provide openings for a different kind of agency.
While classic social psychology emphasizes the power of the immediate situation on behavior, and automaticity research only strengthens this inclination, within these arguments scholars occasionally touch a different perspective. In fact, if we extend our view just a bit, it seems that automaticity is often, perhaps even mostly or always, the result of extended cultivation. The capacity for and tendency toward particular versions of automaticity form in advance, not in the moment of enactment. An excellent example: the reiterative process of counter-stereotype training is somewhat effective. We can then control prejudice with automatically activated bias, at times replacing this with egalitarian thoughts (Glaser and Kihlstrom, 2005: 187). Similarly, if-then plans made far in advance of their implementation—what psychologists call “implementation intentions”—have tremendous effect. They produce “automatic action control by intentionally delegating control of one’s goal-directed thoughts, feelings and behaviors to specific situational cues” (Gollwitzer et al., 2005: 485, 487). In other words, if we tell ourselves we will smile at the neighbor when we see them, we are more likely to do so, even unconsciously, even if they frown. Similarly, “auto-motive theories” describe repeated effort to achieve a particular goal as likely to sediment the unconscious capacity to trigger the same behavior in a similar context; for example, discussing work at a party can become an unconscious, and even explicitly undesired, pattern (Gollwitzer et al., 2005: 503). In other words, within the determinism of The New Unconscious, I see an opening; at a scale beyond the moment, immediate autonomy seems part of habitual patterning.
When we rescale our analysis of the autonomous nervous system, for instance, language and habit appear with a vengeance. Joseph LeDoux describes the amygdala (nuclei within the cerebral hemispheres involved with emotion processing) as a deeply subconscious site, a place of incredibly rapid primary appraisals that are fully complete before conscious thought and language even enters the fray. Yet even here it turns out that appraisal systems are changeable—they respond to both conscious and unconscious cultivation (Murphy and Zajonc, 1993; Ochsner et al., 2012). The commonsense version of this argument simply has language as part of the context that modifies our deepest relational selves; it is inescapably present in our evolution, and therefore inextricable from any of our developed forms of emotion. More specifically, communication affects all of our systems. A rat given a light bulb warning 10 seconds before the stressor is less likely to develop ulcers. Likewise, information provided to people before viewing a film can reduce physiological stress. That is to say, communication in both these cases can reduce stress. Here, language impacts emotional resources of the deepest and most unconscious sort (Lazarus and Alfert, 1964).
Such studies resonate with a thickening thread of contemporary neuroscience in which broader scales are explicitly described as the most consequential. At first blush, Antonio Damasio’s opposition between a prelinguistic core self and an extended self does hint at Massumi’s dualism between language and prelinguistic affect. Trance states, like Pentecostal prayer, seem to yield the extended linguistic self in favor of the core. However, at an extended scale, emotions and Damasio’s “core self” both involve intention and language.
Damasio’s key tool for discussing scale is “disposition.” Disposition helps explain how a limited set of neurons can hold such a vast repertoire of memory. It provides “space-saving mechanisms for information storage” designed to reconstruct maps of cognitive-affect memory. Far more than simply cognition, dispositions control the release of hormones, contract muscles and hold multiple forms of information. They provide packages of neurological data that allow complex concepts and feelings to entangle and act over long periods of time (Damasio, 2010). What Damasio calls dispositions, Columbetti describes as “moods,” while others might call it habit (Columbetti, 2014).
A growing collection of neuroscientists argue that a central, if not primary, evolutionary service of consciousness is its capacity to design repetitive activities which enable autonomic systems to sediment. As Merlin Donald explains: The fact that we can automize our enormous repertoire of mental operations, including routines as diverse as driving, playing the piano and speaking is testimony to the power of human consciousness to supervise and install complex skill hierarchies in our brain … conscious capacity is also needed for acquiring and automizing complex skills and representations, including, of course, more elaborate symbolic skills such as mathematics, music writing speaking and computer programming … These skills are laboriously acquired, over many years, and become completely automatized only in their maturity.
In other words, habit-making, cultivation, or the broadly scaled thinking that makes these plausible, are visible in neuroscience in ways that resonate closely with the stories of cultural studies and Pentecostal practice and offer “third term” efforts to refigure the dualisms of freedom and control that seem so problematic when we regard an event through a very tight temporal scale (Brahinsky, 2012). In this view, there is little reason to see habits and structures as less creative or lively than more chaotic systems.
Scale
This paper is all about scale across disciplines. And on the face of it, scale seems quite dull: what could possibly be interesting, either philosophically or politically, about querying the grain of an analysis? Many of the social scientists who make a practice of thinking closely about scale pose its importance in the idea that bigger or smaller views provide different information. This is certainly useful. However, more intriguingly, in the hard sciences, scale and “scale effects” have come to signal a space for emergent properties, top-down causality, and a collection of complexity effects that challenge reductive thinking in much the way Massumi imagines for affect (Sayre, 2005). In this scenario, scale helps create an object of analysis; choosing a scale performs a consequential cut in the co-constitution of subject and object, and the onto-epistemological implications of such a fluid tool seem immense (Barad, 2007). For instance, the gap between Newtonian and quantum scales seems obvious, although more easily observable examples are proliferating.
The neuroscientist Michael Gazzaniga, for instance, points out that at the level of the neuron, scientists can describe mathematical functionality and a set of causal rules that apply across all species. In other words, if the grain is the neuron, then in certain ways the system is mathematically predictable. However, if we alter the grain to allow us to think about the organism, a whole new set of rules apply which are not predicted by exploring the neuronal level (Gazzaniga, 2011: 124–142). Gazzaniga describes “different types of organization with different types of interactions governed by different laws, and one emerges from the other but does not emerge predictably” (2011: 125). Further, emergent scales can have “top-down” effects on the functioning of lower scales in ways that are “non-redundant.” They do not repeat lower level processes. An organism, for instance, can change all sorts of behavior to effect neuronal activity. The emergent and top-down qualities of these scale relationships challenge neuroscientists who see consciousness as reducible to the effect of a set of causal chains of neuronal firing. Gazzaniga links his work to social science by suggesting that if each scale functions via a logic emergently related to the others, and thus not determined by the others, the gaps between them could provide space for agency.
One could think also of the surveyors who found that differences between grazed and ungrazed species richness diverged between small-scale analyses and a broader view, and not simply by aggregating the whole. Instead, according to Sayre, they found that the dynamics changed as the scale changed (Stohlgren et al., 1999 cited in Sayre, 2005: 279). Or, consider the idea that given a certain density of people, we gain new capacities, that is, collective effervescence is likely a scaled phenomenon (Johnson, 1982). For Sayre, this means that scales are significantly differentiated: “[If] you move far enough across scale, the dominant processes change. It is not just that things get bigger or smaller, but the phenomena themselves change” (2005: 279). These scale effects thus provide “a practical and conceptual device that allows us to climb up and down various dimensions in order to see things from different viewpoints,” while simultaneously consolidating these particular scales via socio-cultural struggle (Zylinska, 2014: 26). Every analysis involves a choice of scales.
On some level, this might provide a generous approach to analysis. Massumi can emphasize the moment of emotion, and I can see the dispositions that enable it; they are both important ways of seeing. Yet multiple scales are not necessarily complementary. For instance, the liberal emphasis on the individual opposes the Marxist focus on the many. Is the grain of our lives the autonomous individual, and is the extent society? That is, do we call ourselves liberal, or do we decide that the most significant thing here is the collective? Or perhaps, as many right-wing theorists argue, the family provides the key agent? These are not simply differences of tone or flavor—they make visible a power struggle at the core of our society. Scale matters, and perhaps in surprising and meaningful ways.
Politics
Despite the intriguing possibility that scale effects might access emergent potentialities, I suspect that outside of a particular conjuncture, scale is politically empty. At first blush it may seem that the event or rupture posed against a stifling hegemony automatically makes for a progressive politics. Yet, I think this is a relatively shallow reading which ignores the importance of conjuncture. The populist evangelicals of the 1890s fought the railroad barons; in the 1930s, they fought big box stores; in the 1950s, they fought the communists of the civil rights movement; and in the 1990s, they became enamored with Walmart (Moreton, 2009). Throughout this history, they used their ruptural practices to inculcate powerful resistance to the “norm”—they produced a rupture, or break. But the norm they responded to changed and, in fact, moved across the political spectrum. In other words, whether they are seen as exemplars of discontinuity (Robbins, 2003) or of cultivation (Brahinsky, 2013), their politics are not joined to their abstract philosophical dynamics. In other words, the abstract philosophical position in favor of or against rupture is not a political one per se. Likewise, holism can be about an organic fascism or an organic hippie progressivism. Additionally, change per se is not always kind; resistance is often in the service of destruction, and the “event” could be the French revolution or the rise of Naziism. Simply put, the abstractions of immediacy, rupture, extension, and cultivation are politically empty until they meet a conjuncture where they have an effect.
Arguments between scales—between, for instance, moment and disposition—provide even less clarity about their political implications. Likewise, the politics of habit are rich and equivocal. At times, the habits of hegemony must be broken, but in other moments, the habits of resistance or revolution need cultivation. At times, the grid is so tight that we need an explosion to break free, but at other moments the slow but unceasing grinding of a radical renewal is key for change. At this point I begin to wonder if there is any connection between politics and philosophy that can stick, or if this relationship is so conjunctural as to defy all abstraction.
Conclusion
Of course, it can feel quite natural to imagine a vital sense of agency at the level of the individual and the single moment of choice or feeling. This liberal habit of inflecting our theory toward a narrow scale is difficult to break. But if we experiment and scale the analysis out a bit so as to explore a wider view, our perception of groups and individuals often suggests a different valence. Returning to Massumi and Libet, we can see the important role that scale plays in their narratives, for the concern about determinism is scaled quite close. Yet if we step back just a touch from their half-second analysis—and this is where Pentecostal cultivation and Damasio’s dispositions can guide us—we see all sorts of will, effort and language involved in the developing of habitual experiences which might seem fully pre-determined by immediate readiness potential when examined up close. In other words, even if we fully accept Libet’s empirical claims and Massumi’s analysis, there is an important analytic left unconsidered: scale. 11 At a particular temporal scale, we are subject to the determination of our unconscious readiness potential. Through this same scale, affect appears unintelligible, and Pentecostal practice seems spontaneous. Scale it out more broadly, however, and events seem willed and affect seems trained—perhaps willed by a subject, perhaps a collective, perhaps structured by language. From this perspective, Pentecostal rupture results from extended training. Further, the body’s capacity for and propensity toward emotion could still provide a freedom from the gridded dreariness of modern life, but not one disconnected from thought, language, or choosing. Instead, choice here builds over weeks and months of training. To reframe Aristotle, Pentecostal practices teach that habit, even habits so deeply controlled by subterranean emotions, may express a highly regimented, deeply planned willfulness: either a progressive teleological will, or perhaps a willful rejection of the telos, but a will nevertheless. Whether this will is individual or collective, and how to scale its groupness, is another question. And yet, in all, freedom can involve more than a moment and does not oppose structure, but likely requires it.
In the end, five arguments grow from a study of Pentecostal practices writ large and abstracted. First, scale matters as it helps us parse the arguments we are making: it turns seeming paradoxes into separable elements that might be complements or might battle for primacy. Immediacy and training thus might become coconstitutive, but also essentializable lenses and practices, or they could be two deeply contested views of experience staked on the consequence of choosing one side or the other. Second, scale suggests that affect is not fundamentally “without form or structure” (Grossberg, 1992: 82). Instead, the lack of perceived form is by virtue of a particularly scaled lens. Third, scaled analyses that allow for different logics at different scales might open space in totalizing grids, providing, perhaps, a touch of relief from the agency-anxiety of Western existence. Fourth, to assuage our agency-anxiety is not necessarily to build a politics. Pentecostals help us see that this form of abstract philosophizing cannot serve as political panacea. While form or lack thereof may suggest a more or less agential individual, a more or less agential institution, or some other consequential scale, without a particular conjuncture and a particular struggle any of those abstractions can fly south, north, left, right, or deep into the ground. That is, it seems likely that philosophy—and affect—without context is politically bereft, and importantly, without this recognition in those contexts, is likely to serve the powers that be. Finally, what comprises a more powerful agent for change: a singular moment, or a deeply sedimented sensibility or habit? Perhaps these cultivated moods, dispositions and habits do suggest an active middle ground—if not a site for politics, then at least a potentiality—between the seeming agency of immediate individual action or affective rupture and the seeming determinism of static structure, whether linguistic, neurological, or emotional.
Footnotes
Acknowledgments
I would like to acknowledge the tremendous help on this paper from Barbara Epstein, Jim Clifford, Jon Bialeski, Tanya Luhrmann, Marilyn Westerkamp, and Felicity Aulino and some fantastic editing and co-thinking from Ivan R Gillis.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.