Unsettling Affect

Abstract

Unsettling Affect Pamela K. Gilbert (bio) Despite long-standing critiques of dominant theories of emotion, the basic structure of emotions is persistently considered by many commentators and even researchers, such as those in the social sciences and artificial intelligence, to be largely settled. Our understanding of emotion and affect is indebted to universalizing physiological theories emerging from the Enlightenment, and subsequently, from evolutionary science. Each of the authors in this forum is interested in unsettling our sense of how feelings work and signify. Alisha Walters and Zachary Samalin detail how the history of emotions depended upon nineteenth-century beliefs about embodied racial and civilizational hierarchies. Such beliefs about emotion were also undergirded by and instrumentalized in the imperial context, as Samalin, Walters, and Sukanya Banerjee show. Often they relied on definitions of modernity that imposed the burden of anteriority and primitivism on racial alterity. Sympathy was and is both centered and critiqued as a mode of community building and bridging racial divides. Rachel Ablow, Banerjee, and I each examine some of its prerequisites, opposites, and alternatives. Finally, although several of the essays here examine particular feelings, or histories or assemblages of feelings, the concept of affective potential has a history as well, as Elisha Cohn demonstrates. By exploring oppositions swirling around these terms and structures, these essays collectively invite us to consider the affordances of those histories and to question their deployment in the present. Samalin limns the history of Darwin’s research in “Affect Theory’s Colonial Sources.” Whereas Darwin’s liberal universalist project still underlies much discussion of emotion, so too do Enlightenment liberalism’s investments in racial [End Page 592] hierarchy and domination. Darwin’s sources all over the world were steeped in racial theories which, as Samalin shows, were tightly connected to “assertions of civilizational difference”; in turn, stadial theories of development tended to be organized around concepts of affect (562). Together, these two types of theories mediated the nexus between individuals and cultural groups. The study of emotion has long claimed objective universality while simultaneously relying on appeals to feeling itself as evidentiary, as Walters makes clear. In “James Hunt, Robert Knox, and the Feelings of Empirical Race Science,” Walters argues that while race science called for a future of objectivity, it depended upon a present of “unruly” feelings (555). She discusses the Celtic section of Knox’s The Races of Men (1850), in which race comes to be defined through the feelings marking the dangerously emotional Celtic body and its supposed proclivity for violence. The period mobilized such feelings in the service of an imperial modernity. Banerjee’s “Loyalty” notes the importance of that feeling in Adam Smith’s writing as a precondition for sympathy. She explores the ways in which loyalty is positioned as uneasily contractual and performative yet natural and customary, deriving from deliberate alliance on the one hand and on predefined allegiance on the other. Arguing that loyalty is fundamental to modernity’s many-layered institutions—the family, the state, the economy—Banerjee shows how this “associational attachment” must also insist upon exclusions in turn grounded in loyalty itself (qtd. in Banerjee 568). Sympathy has of course long been an important term—perhaps even the most important—in discussions of the history of emotion as well as in literature and aesthetics. Saidiya Hartman, among other current critics, has taught us to be less trusting of sympathy, which at best “fails to expand the space of the [Black] other but merely places the [white] self in its stead” (Hartman 20). Yet, as Ablow observes, the importance of sympathy as a generator of social action is still a fundamental assumption underlying present social science discussions. But the critique of sympathy’s centrality was nascent in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century thinkers; then, too, the question of what alternatives might inspire action often swirled around questions of race. Ablow shows us how the counter discourse against the effectiveness of sympathy extended into the literary world. In “Unsettling Sympathy,” Ablow shows how Martineau avoids such appeals in her novel about the Haitian revolution, emphasizing instead the “insane contradictions” created by slavery (qtd. in Ablow 576). Ablow argues that the text incites only horror in the...