Browsing by Subject "Affect"

Affects are not reducible to feelings or emotions. On the contrary, Affect Before

Spinoza investigates the extent to which affects exceed, reconfigure and reorganize

bodies and subjects. Affects are constitutive of and integral to dynamic economies of

activity and passivity. This dissertation traces the origins and histories of this definition

of affect, from the Latin affectus, discovering emergent affective approaches to faith,

devotional poetry and philosophy in early modernity. For early modern believers across

confessions, faith was neither reducible to a dry intellectual concern nor to a personal,

emotional appeal to God. Instead, faith was a transformative relation between humans

and God, realized in affective terms that, in turn, reconfigured theories of human agency

and activity. Beginning with John Calvin and continuing through the work of John

Donne, John Milton, and Baruch Spinoza, Affect Before Spinoza posits affectus as a basis

of faith in an emergent Reformed tradition as well as a term that informs disparate

developments in poetry and philosophy beyond Reformed Orthodoxy. Calvin's

configuration of affect turns existing languages of the passions and of rhetorical motives

towards an understanding of faith and certainty. In this sense, Calvin, Donne, Spinoza

and Milton use affectus to pose questions of agency, will, tendency, inclination, and

determinism.

This dissertation develops a "politics of ambiguity" through case studies of affect in contemporary works by European, American and Singaporean composers. While studies of intercultural music have focused on narratives of power relations (e.g. orientalism, postcolonial ambivalence), a new method of interpretation can be based on the affective ambiguity that arises from intercultural encounters, indicating a less than totalitarian power and thus forming a basis for political struggle. The focus is on three pieces of music by American-born John Sharpley, Belgium-born Robert Casteels, and Singaporean Joyce Koh, who hail from across the globe and incorporate Asian musics, arts, and philosophies into a variety of modernist, neo-romantic, and postmodern musical idioms. Modalities of ambiguity include: perceptual focus on musicalized Chinese calligraphy strokes, versus perceptual liminality arising from modernist technique; the musical embodiment of Buddhist disembodiment; and, ambiguous relationality of intercultural sounds. Liminality, disembodiment, and relationality mark the cessation of identity politics in favor of a form of cultural hermeneutics that pays heed to the complex interaction between society, sonic media and the neurophysiology of listening.

This dissertation examines how perceptions of beauty in Brazil reflect both the existing social inequalities and the struggles to produce a more egalitarian society. While hegemonic discourses about beauty in Brazil foster an upper-middle class, white standard, the working-class make claims to citizenship by redefining beauty according to their own affective, sensory experiences. As I see it, the affective relationship that plastic surgery patients have towards their own bodies is central to understanding why beauty is a source of social recognition in Brazil. In this dissertation, I argue that even though discourse attempts to discipline the body to perceive only the "truths" it produces, subjects reinhabit discourses through their immediate sensory experiences, opening up the political space to generate social change.

In order to access this form of "cosmetic citizenship," however, working-class patients undergo low-cost aesthetic surgeries in public hospitals, which are subsidized by the State and help build the national reputation of plastic surgeons. I argue that this national investment in beauty establishes personal appearance as a precondition for citizenship and inclusion in the nation. While media narratives construct beauty as a vehicle for upward mobility in Brazil, the medical discourse about beauty imagines the Brazilian population as becoming progressively homogeneous through "miscegenation" and surgery. These discourses depend on the raciology established by Neo-Lamarckian eugenics at the beginning of the twentieth century, and later popularized by the work of Gilberto Freyre.

“Cruel Operators: History, Empire, and Affect in the Global Anglophone Novel,” reanimates and repoliticizes the idea of “cruel aesthetics” within contemporary literature by placing cruelty at the crux of global capitalism’s operational antihumanist logic. Historicizing this logic, the project uses a more nuanced definition of the field of Global Anglophone literature as a space to contend with the economic, racial, and emotional legacies of empire. In turn, affective and aesthetic readings of the diverse novels of Jamaica Kincaid, W.G. Sebald, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Rachel Cusk as Global Anglophone, rather than British, allows for a criticism of global capitalism that is grounded within legacies of empire. The project shows how Jamaica Kincaid’s and W.G. Sebald’s focus on everyday cruelties and historical anachronisms reestablish narrative connections between the networks of violence between colony and empire. It also illustrates how Kazuo Ishiguro’s characters connect the mental and physical servitude within imperial power dynamics to current conditions of work. Finally, locating Rachel Cusk’s novels within a financialized world shows the ubiquitous anxiety of neoliberal present. While the project embraces the universalism of capitalist realities and their imperial foundations, it is only through the concrete expressions and everyday realities of life that the universal architecture of global capitalism can be assessed. Ultimately, linking colonialism with contemporary capitalism formally carves out new “ways beyond” the erasure, paralysis, and the anxiety of the crushing force of dominating world-systems by embracing a politics of refusal, allyship, solidarity, and the bolstering of a “collective intelligence” that comes from the systematic appraisal of cruel aesthetics.

Emotions guide the way individuals interact with the world, influencing nearly every psychological process from attention, to learning, to metacognition. Constructionist models of emotion posit that emotions arise out of combinations of more general psychological ingredients. These psychological ingredients, however, also form the building blocks of other affective responses such as subjective reactions to rewarding and social stimuli. Here, I propose a domain-general account of affective functioning; I contend that subjective responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli all depend on common psychological and neural mechanisms. I support this hypothesis with three independent studies using both a basic science approach and a clinical approach. In the first study (Chapter 2) I demonstrate that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), which has been implicated in encoding the value of primary, monetary, and social rewards, also encodes the hedonic value of emotional stimuli. In addition to showing that the mechanisms responsible for processing affective information are shared across reward and emotional processing, I also discuss the relevance of a domain-general constructionist account of affect for clinical disorders. In particular, I hypothesize that in anorexia nervosa (AN), affective disturbances should be manifest across responses to emotional, rewarding, and social stimuli (Chapter 3). In Chapter 4, I provide empirical evidence for this conclusion by demonstrating that when viewing social stimuli, women with a history of AN show disturbances in the insula, a brain region that is responsible for interoceptive and affective processing. This suggests that the interpersonal difficulties frequently observed in patients with AN may be due to biases in domain-general affective responses. In Chapter 5, I support this conclusion by showing that individual differences in harm avoidance in healthy women, women with a current diagnosis of AN, and women who have recovered from AN explain the relationship between disordered eating and social dysfunction. Collectively, these results indicate that subjective affective responses to rewarding, emotional, and social information all rely on common mechanisms as would be suggested by a domain-general theory of affect. Furthermore, the application of a constructionist domain-general account of affect can help to explain the fundamental nature of affective disturbances in psychiatric disorders such as AN.

Misleading claims surround us – we encounter them in news stories, advertising campaigns, and political propaganda. How do people separate facts from fiction? Decades of work implicate fluency, or subjective ease. Repeated statements feel easier to process, and thus more truthful, than new ones (i.e., illusory truth). This dissertation identifies additional cues for truth and takes a lifespan perspective. Older adults accumulate impressive amounts of knowledge (which may protect them), but also unduly attend to positive information (which may leave them vulnerable to emotional appeals). In two experiments, older adults exhibited illusory truth only when they lacked knowledge about claims, unlike young adults. Three additional experiments encouraged young adults to “stick with” what they knew. Evaluating truth at exposure prompted young adults to use their knowledge later, wiping out the illusion. Three final experiments disproved the idea that positivity “feels like” truth. Young adults exhibited a negativity bias, where negative faces made claims seem less true than neutral ones. Neither positive nor negative faces swayed older adults’ judgments. These results inform many theoretical perspectives – from fluency and referential theories of truth, to dual-process and socioemotional selectivity theories of aging. They also have important practical implications for preventing and correcting misconceptions in a “post-truth world,” where falsehoods travel farther and faster than the truth.

Patients undergoing intensive treatments for life-limiting chronic illnesses such as cancer often experience severe cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms. Immunotherapies such as high-dose Interleukin-2 (IL-2) can result in severe alterations in cognition, affect, and sleep. These alterations not only prevent patients from receiving their full course of treatment but also severely impact the quality of life of patients and their care partners. A mixed-method case study approach was used to investigate the trajectory of these symptoms from three key informants (the patient receiving IL-2, the care partner, and the primary nurse) in ten IL-2 cases over up to four treatment hospitalizations. Quantitative measurement scores and qualitative reports of symptom change were compiled to understand the symptom trajectory within and across treatment hospitalizations.

This dissertation includes a systematic literature review in Chapter 2 that highlights the lack of trajectory analysis surrounding cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms in patients undergoing IL-2, as well as the gravity and impact that these symptoms have on patients and their families. Chapter 3 features the study team’s evaluation of methods using a case study approach to collect quantitative and qualitative data from one patient, care partner, and primary nurse as a case triad to examine cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms one patient diagnosed with MRCC experienced during one hospitalization for IL-2 treatment and served as the foundation for the larger study. Chapters 4 and 5 synthesized data from case informants in the larger study and described the trajectory of cognitive symptoms and affective and sleep disturbance symptoms, respectively, that patients receiving IL-2 therapy for renal cell carcinoma experienced within and across hospitalizations.

Cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms are often synergistic and interdependent. Of these symptoms, fatigue and anxiety were the most frequently reported, worsening with each subsequent dose of IL-2, suggesting a cumulative dosing effect. Interventions should be uniquely designed to target patients receiving IL-2, care partners, nurses, and the healthcare team with the aim of reducing commonly reported yet severely incapacitating symptoms. A reduction in these symptoms can reduce other cognitive, affective, and sleep disturbance symptoms, improving the patient’s overall symptom trajectory experience.

In this dissertation, I examine the widespread failure of racial reconciliation work between black and white Christians in US American churches. I treat such failure as a failure of love, specifically the failure of black and white Christians to love each other as enemies. This sets two primary tasks for the dissertation. First, I work to understand this failure of love. Drawing on black studies—on the work of Frank Wilderson, in particular—I examine what I call the racial enemy relation, which I argue is a fundamental antagonism between black people and white people. This antagonism is grounded in and perpetuates white supremacist systems of violence and exploitation. I turn to affect theory to argue that this enemy relation is obscured by a distorted love. At the heart of this distorted love is what Sara Ahmed calls the promise of happiness. In short, I argue that racial reconciliation work fails insofar as Christians embrace an idea of love that confuses good feelings with good relations and, in doing so, are unable to confront the racial enemy relation with faithful love.

Second, I give a Christian theological account of faithful love that can guide intervention into the distorted love of white supremacy and promote a constructive approach to love of the racial enemy. In conversation primarily with black, womanist, and feminist theologies, I argue for a notion of faithful love as the embrace of the lover’s need for the beloved, while holding such love accountable to self-love, love for God, and God’s love for those who suffer. I ground this account of love in an understanding of divine love as driven by God’s need for creation, including humanity. Ultimately, I argue that in confronting the racial enemy, Christians are called to embrace their need for their enemy and to pursue that need toward conditions of mutuality in their broader society.

By the time of David Hume and Adam Smith, as A.O. Hirschman famously tells us, the early modern passions had been rehabilitated as a creative force, one driven by economic interest. From the turn of the nineteenth century onward, however, the passions returned with a vengeance — as indicated by the works of Jeremy Bentham, Thomas Malthus, and the Brontë sisters. What we now call “the emotions” had suddenly slipped out from under the control of individual reason and become a force of nature. As such, they could be held responsible both for keeping the individual alive and for the species’ ability to prosper and expand in number. Michel Foucault has offered perhaps the clearest articulation of how the century that followed developed new forms of government that both taught individuals to manage themselves by observing disciplinary regimens and regulated the unruliness of entire populations by means of biopolitical policies. But while, like Hirschman, Foucault links the redefinition of sexuality and how behaviors and effects were classified and managed directly to the emergence of industrial capitalism, neither he nor Hirschman consider the novel instrumental in their respective accounts of the passions. Novels, as the self-anointed discourse of personal experience, were ideally positioned to respond both critically and creatively to the disruptions of daily life that began in the late eighteenth century. In the decades that followed, I will show, the novel successively updated the causes and effects of emotional experience to accommodate the transition to an industrial society from an agrarian way of life supported by commerce and early colonization.

From Jane Eyre to Daniel Deronda, the novel features a protagonist whose biographical destiny depends on a form of yearning well in excess of the prevailing social classification system. This unnamable sense of belonging elsewhere is indeed so in excess of then existing codes of conduct and self-expression that it escapes the confines of the individual and pervades each habitat it enters with a sense of lack and constriction. The natural principles Charles Darwin first discovered during his landmark Voyage of the Beagle gave him the grounds, by 1872, to conclude that just as any species, man or animal, must physically adapt to its environment, so too must its feelings. Darwin understood that these affects — a term I use for feelings that have not been codified as one of the then recognized emotions — allow the species to develop new relations among themselves to enable survival. Over the century, the novel followed this same principle perhaps more so than any other form of writing, as it sought to alter the basis of human feeling to accommodate the material conditions of existence. My introduction explains how the novel carried out this project by capturing and reforming feelings in excess of accepted social roles and reworked both feelings and roles to form emotional ties capable of sustaining domestic life: first, during the early decades of the nineteenth century as inherited land lost its status as the coin of the realm, then in the economic crisis called the Hungry Forties, and finally during the period when England’s economy shifted from the English countryside to the imperial metropole.