Introduction to Focus: The Affective Turn

Abstract

Page 3 September–October 2008 The Affective Turn Introduction to Focus: Aaron D. Chandler, Focus Editor If we need evidence that emotions, understood in their broadest sense, continue to pose a serious problem to our stand-by interpretive frameworks, consider Hillary Clinton’s teary moment in January of this year. Responding to a New Hampshire voter’s question about her campaigning fortitude, Clinton turned unexpectedly demonstrative and answered with a broken voice and watery eyes. “You know, this is very personal for me,” she confided, “it’s not just political…it’s not just public.” This expression of “personal” feeling would become quite “public” and “political” indeed, when within hours video of the incident was being unremittingly replayed on every news outlet and scrutinized by millions onYouTube. Many in the media took the crying as a symptom, and though there was only modest agreement about the disease, the prognosis was emphatically grave. Television pundits and putative experts often shot off their diagnoses in the form of loaded questions: Was Hillary herself becoming unglued? Had the Clinton machine simply malfunctioned? Would this be taken as proof of a basic feminine fragility unsuited to the demands of presidential leadership? The commentariat consulted itself and agreed that these tears marked the end of a political dynasty, even as many New Hampshirites spoke quietly, though uncertainly, of a newfound compassion for the candidate. Two days later, Clinton won New Hampshire handily, and a second fusillade of questions followed. How had everyone been so mistaken? Had her tears alone moved the electorate? Would these televised tears work against her in the general election against a more hawkish rival? Hidden beneath these difficulties was another: could a small pang of feeling, so palpably unbidden and contingent, really shift the course of an historic nomination? And opposed to this, yet another question lurked: had this sob been nothing more than a performance—an act of political cunning? Was “The Cry Heard ’Round the World” a case of proverbial crocodile tears? In brief, for a gusty week or two, water-cooler denizens and network analysts puzzled and opined over how “private” feeling could go so public so fast while “public” feeling could remain so secretive. Hillary herself alluded to the tearful moment in her victory speech, declaring that the state had “helped her find her voice.” Esteemed columnists wrote think pieces citing the damp cheeks of politicians past—Ed Muskie in 1972, Pat Schroeder in 1987—but nothing seemed to solve the problem that the meaning of a spontaneous, selfevident emotional expression was not equally natural and self-evident. A new spate of scholarly studies in affect and emotion may help to illuminate this kind of problem or perhaps explain why we distinguish it as a problem in the first place. This special “Focus” of ABR considers some of the most interesting recent contributions to the critical conversation about affect, emotion, and their place in cultures of the present and past. Still, one must begin by noting that this critical conversation itself became heated well over a decade ago in fields as diverse as neurobiology, anthropology, psychology, sociology, as well as in cultural and literary theory. One could go further back, of course, given that opinion-makers have fretted for centuries over the hows and whys of feeling, public and otherwise. Though one would never guess it, given their assorted outbursts, Clinton, Barack Obama, and John McCain are all members of the legislative body George Washington described as the saucer in which the tea of popular passions cooled. Indeed, this unrest over other people’s feelings goes much further back—through the pages of Immanuel Kant, Thomas Hobbes, Plato—as far as we might cognition and emotion not as polar opposites but rather as closely related elements in our manner of being, as if deliberative reason were the nimble forefingers of cognition and emotion the clinching thumb. Getting rid of the old reason/emotion opposition was philosopher Ronald de Sousa’s primary aim in The Rationality of the Emotions (1987). Similarly, neurobiologist Antonio R. Damasio, in his popular Descartes’ Error (1994) and The Feeling of What Happens (1999), argues that thinking and feeling are indissolubly linked; neuroscientist Joseph...