CONCLUSION

It is rather vulgarly, then, that philosophy poses to psychology the question: tell me what you aim for so that I may find out what you are[.] But a philosopher can also address himself to the psychologist in the form of offering orientation advice (one time does not a habit make!), and say to him: when one leaves the Sorbonne by the street Saint-Jacques, one can ascend or descend; if one ascends, one approaches the Pantheon, the conservatory of great men; but if one descends, one heads directly to the Police Department.

—GEORGES CANGUILHEM, “WHAT IS PSYCHOLOGY?”

IN 1956, GEORGES CANGUILHEM GAVE A LECTURE titled “What Is Psychology?” “The psychologist,” Canguilhem began, “seems to be more embarrassed by the question ‘What is psychology?’ than the philosopher by the question ‘What is philosophy?’” The history of philosophy is characterized by a constant debate over its methods, its significance, its validity. Philosophy is “constituted by the question of its sense and essence much more than it is defined by any answer to it.”¹ Philosophy, then, is less about the achievement of truth than a constant attempt to rethink the very possibility of knowledge, of being, of existence, of philosophy as such. Psychology is not guided by this constant questioning. Its legitimacy comes from an appeal to “efficiency,” from its ability to measure, verify, and propose a solution for a range of problems said to derive from the mind. But the “mind” lacks coherence as a scientific object. Efficiency alone cannot unify the range of disciplines that are, in some sense, “psychological,” which would include experimental psychology, clinical psychology, psychoanalysis, psychiatry, and even neurology. The unity that is “psychology” falls apart. We have, instead, a general drive toward efficiency, not specific objects, not specific methods, not specific institutions, not specific truths. Canguilhem concludes, then, “We do not have the power to prevent anyone from just considering themselves ‘psychologists’ and calling whatever they do ‘psychology.’”²

Throughout this book, I’ve shown how experimental psychology, especially in the United States, has deferred to technical measurement to legitimate psychology as a science—a deferral that produces a range of varied, incommensurable objects that all go by the same name and are assumed to be equivalent and exchangeable, objects called “emotion,” or “affect,” or “empathy.” If, as Canguilhem points out, the goal of efficiency is not sufficient to ground a science, if it cannot determine who is a scientist and who is not, then experimental psychology has policed its boundaries through deferral to technical instruments, access to their measurements, knowledge of their use. The instrument comes to perform disciplinary authority. The measurement defines truth, produces truth, makes “scientific” arguments out of phenomena that—as William James was aware—were more often associated with spiritualism, religion, and mysticism. And measurement, rather than identifying and formalizing a range of qualities to describe a singular object, expands and produces as many objects as there are instruments to measure.

Even if we do not accept the inevitable, technical multiplication of objects, a deferral to the mechanical objectivity of an instrument cannot guarantee scientific authority anyway. When an instrument is employed to “see” and materialize that which is otherwise beyond experience, it both produces the phenomena observed and, more questionably, maintains a broader ideology. This ideology presumes the existence of an inaccessible beyond, a beyond that conflates the interiority of the other with metaphysical speculation. It tells us that this beyond will be accessible in the future, that we—individuals, societies, nations—can regain a lost fullness once we have the technology to finally realize and reveal hidden knowledge of the mind’s movements and feelings. We will know, through instrumental measurement, the secret that guides the judgment of art, the secret of self-control and education, the secret of another’s emotions, the secret of evil, the secret of trauma. When the body is extended and the empirical is remade with instrumental sensation, the authority of measurement legitimates belief in a metaphysical outside that the instrument permits us to access as never before.

The intertwining of instrumental authority and a metaphysical beyond has been an occasional theme in modern culture. Modernist poet Blaise Cendrars’s 1926 novel Moravagine, for instance, begins in a mental asylum, where the book’s narrator—the literally named physician Raymond la Science—describes in rapt wonder the details of his hospital:

Then I made a tour of the mechanical installations. These were truly a model of their kind. Hydraulic, electronic apparatus, the paraphernalia of mechanotherapy, bowls, phials, test-tubes, angle-tubes of glass, of rubber, of copper; steel springs, enameled petals, white levers, water-taps, everything shining, everything furbished, polished, meticulously, pitilessly clean. On the walls, nozzles racked up in pan-flute series glowed like a menacing show of weapons, and on the plate-glass tubes and trays were other weapons, carefully laid out, smaller and more mysterious, irregular and elliptical forms, discs and balls, the keys to anaesthetic massage. On the white tiles of the wards the bathtubs, ergometers and immense percolators appeared as if on a screen, with the same terrible and savage grandeur that objects have in films: a grandeur of intensity . . . the frightening sum of permanent energy contained in every inanimate object.³

In every instrument, a fetish. The techniques of the laboratory bring their own animist energies even as objects remain still and gleaming in the sanitarium. The deferral to the instrument always leads elsewhere, to a metaphysics that cannot be contained and cannot be determined.

We might name this excess as affect. Cendrars’s “intensity” and “permanent energy” is not an illusion projected by la Science, this interpretation would claim. La Science has managed to grasp the energies that these instruments allow seen and, potentially, liberated. Accepting this argument would mean that affect, despite the constant turn to biology and neurology to reframe cultural theory as “scientific,” emerges from the very moment in which instrumental authority is simultaneously necessary but inevitably forgotten. Like la Science, we approach the techniques and instruments of the Affect Lab as a means to access to a metaphysical beyond. The instrument is an otherworldly agency that expands sensation into an uncharted real hitherto unknown, not a material device.

Yet as I’ve been claiming throughout this book, this metaphysical beyond does not exist—if we want to be materialists, at least. The beyond is, like the truth of psychology, a product of the qualities of an instrument. The fetish of the instrument produces the embodied affects it discovers. There is no beyond, there is no primal, spiritual energy discovered through experimentation. Claiming that psychology, in its studies of emotion, has experimentally discovered something called “affect” requires accepting the instrument as a portal to the beyond, a portal that can capture the truth of the body without writing, without language, without form.⁴ This argument simply cannot be made—it would be ridiculous to claim that a scientific instrument can reveal something primal that is otherwise beyond culture, beyond language, beyond meaning, beyond consciousness.⁵ If we do so, and we take the instrument as this otherworldly portal, rather than poaching a scientific concept and borrowing scientific affects⁶ we achieve the perfection of scientism.⁷ We assume an unflagging and uncritical faith in the power of science. Science becomes a religion, its instruments talismans of its occultic authority, and the everyday, material facts of scientific knowledge are excluded in the name of scientific expertise. White coats become the vestments of the hospital and the laboratory. The EEG and the photograph become holy relics. Though perhaps this connection has always been latent in these histories.⁸

Maintaining the existence of something called “affect,” as I see it, can follow one of two possible directions. The first is to reject any deferral to psychology and neuroscience that accepts their arguments as decontextualized truths, acknowledging that affect is a variable, symbolic quality invented at the intersection of bodies and machines. Otherwise, accepting arguments from psychology and neuroscience as the empirical truth of the brain and body must assume that these claims are separate from the material life of laboratory research. “The turn to affect has corresponded with a disciplinary turn away from detail, from specificity and the local,” argues Eugenie Brinkema.⁹ The obliteration of the local is a particularly strange problem when it comes to the Affect Lab. Any link between the affective and the biological happens only in a local, specific place, in the material life of the laboratory. Thus affect theory must either remove reference to the psychological or must foreground the material foundations of its own arguments. These material foundations are not about the human body but about the material capacities of a medium. Affect theory, then, becomes a variant of materialist media theory,¹⁰ and a media theory of affect must embrace the history of science and medicine beyond a superficial engagement with “science” that treats the scientific as “fact” divorced from contingency, anarchy, and error.

The second possibility is to admit that affect is not material, but is one among many names for an unknown, metaphysical substance, a substance that permeates the entire history of Western thought. Like Schopenhauer’s will, these substances are only grasped through a permanent and irreconcilable dualism between, on one hand, representation, sensation, experience, and, on the other, the affective, metaphysical ground that is “reality.” But contemporary affect theory often acts as if affect, as a material thing, is not dualistic, is “real” and “physical” and thus not reducible to will, or the élan vital, Lucretius’s atoms, Aristotle’s substance, Plato’s forms, and so on. My point here is that the entire history of philosophy contains countless names for a substance that moves, that flows, that grounds life, that may or may not be capturable through empirical sensation. Affect’s “difference” comes from the turn to biology and psychology, which, as I’ve been claiming, ontologically requires—yet also refuses—the materiality of media. It is completely plausible to maintain affect as one among many other names for this metaphysical substance, but doing so would radically revise almost all the ontological assumptions of affect theory, making it into a form of transcendental idealism, not a new materialism.

In the history of psychology, emotion and affect have been—and continue to be—defined by the qualities of the instruments used in psychological research. With William James’s planchette, affect and emotion are preconscious and automatic—qualities of the planchette. With serial photography, with books and folios of faces collected in multiple, affect and emotion are a series of discrete categories that can be observed, categorized, and compared—qualities of serial photography. With the Dynograph, affect and emotion are temporal and sequential—qualities that characterize the inscriptions of the Dynograph. And with the E-Meter, affect and emotion are evidence of metaphysical, religious themes that collapse time and space—qualities that emerge from the differences between the E-Meter and other measures of electrodermal response. Of course, these technologies exist at the intersection of a much wider range of contextual considerations, including, but not limited to, the legacy of spiritualism, the spectacular consumption of women’s pain, anti-psychiatry and the prison, and the militaristic legacy of Freudian psychoanalysis. But my ultimate point is how the instrument, in serving as a concatenation of a range of historical, contextual concerns, provides the means to make emotion “objective” by materializing these concerns.

Let us recall Gaston Bachelard’s claim: “It may well be the instruments that produce the phenomenon in the first place. And instruments are nothing but theories materialized.”¹¹ This may seem to imply an idealist dialectic—that “theory” is reflected and made concrete in the “matter” that is the instrument and experiment. I do not believe this to be the case, and follow Karen Barad when she claims, “Experimenting and theorizing are dynamic practices that play a constitutive role in the production of objects and subjects and matter and meaning . . . theorizing and experimenting are not about intervening (from outside) but about intra-acting from within, and as part of, the phenomena produced.”¹² The instrument is a materialization of historical and contextual practices within a specific object. When an instrument is taken from one context to another, it nonetheless retains marks of its original setting. The planchette never ceases to be an instrument for the occult generation of automatic writing. The photograph never ceases to be a means to stop time and categorize. The Dynograph never ceases to measure the brain and body temporally. The E-Meter never ceases to let temporality vanish into the ether. The instrument materializes one theory and is appropriated elsewhere, and the conjunction of a body and a machine invent qualities that, because the original context is ignored or—more likely—actively excluded, then the meaning of a quality measured becomes something else. The instrument never truly loses the marks of its history, and thus we can see how a media history of psychology presents a new way of thinking about scientific error and anarchy—about violations of method, about improvisation, and how these are central to the production of fact.¹³

Finally, why do we care about directly knowing the emotions of another? Or, not just knowing these emotions, but entering-into and experiencing the emotions of another? Why is it that the social bond is imagined as emotional and conjunctive? Why has this been a problem for the twentieth century that extends into our present? These questions guide the contemporary context this book works to reimagine. Today, vicariously experiencing the emotions of another is often assumed to have a political and moral valiance. “Affect” is one way of grasping this vicarious, connective experience of emotion. When affect is “transmitted” from one to another there is a sociality that, to use the words of Teresa Brennan, “undermines the dichotomy between the individual and the environment and the related opposition between the biological and the social.”¹⁴ The specific articulation of this transmission of feeling, its relation to moral and political assumptions of community, are what “empathy” is often assumed to indicate, a cognitive ability to share feelings and “express a deep bond that can make others feel like an extension of the self.”¹⁵ Our present supposedly has a “crisis of empathy,” leading toward cruelty, dehumanization, and social violence.¹⁶ Psychology has given us one answer for this “crisis.” Literature, film, virtual reality, and other forms of media—with “content” designed specifically to cultivate identification, designed to allow the reader, viewer, player to “feel-into” a fictional simulation—applies the methods of psychology to fictional representation. Media become an automatic means to cultivate identification and sympathy with “characters who are outgroup members,” transferring this identification onto “empathy with outgroup members in the real world,” allowing readers and viewers to “act on that empathic response in, for example, supporting anti-discrimination legislation.”¹⁷

This popular “ethics” and “politics” takes emotional identification as the highest value—identification assumed generated through imagining oneself in the same position as a fictional character, or through enduring digital simulations of another’s experience. Of course, this identification is limited and disciplinary, carrying with it a “proper” understanding of sentiment, sympathy, and emotional life.¹⁸ But perhaps something deeper is at stake, something that presumes the very existence of alterity—of the fact that there are other people and that their interests, feelings, and motivations are beyond my knowledge—is a barrier to social well-being. In his classic philosophical analysis of alterity, Emmanuel Levinas argues that the ultimate metaphysical abyss emerges from the depth of another, the fact that the face signifies an interiority forever inaccessible.¹⁹ We cannot reduce this Otherness to ourselves, which Levinas terms “the Same.” Ethics, for Levinas, is based on this precondition of otherness. The mere existence of other people—that the other is unknowable and incomprehensible, that the ethical demand is an openness to this radical alterity—this, for Levinas, is a, if not the, central metaphysical problem of existence. But accepting this alterity is antithetical to contemporary technological life. “The negativity of alterity and foreignness—in other words, the resistance of the Other—disturbs and delays the smooth communication of the Same,” says philosopher Byung-Chul Han.²⁰ Technologies for identifying, transmitting, and fostering emotional identification work to make the mysteries of metaphysical alterity the very material of “the Same.” Through the mediation of technology, you become me.²¹ Art becomes a means to mediate separation out of existence. And this, it seems, will restore “community” and “compassion” through media.

We seem, then, to have returned to the very beginning of this book—a recursion of the context in which Schiller, Lessing, Herder, Vischer, and Lipps were linking emotion, national identity, and art. Feeling-into a work of art is once again assumed to create a synthetic unity through mediation of fiction, of simulation, of spectacle. Examples of these emotional, empathetic spectacles are everywhere. From reality television, to videogames, to contemporary performance, to installation art, the normative aesthetic demand seems to be one that privileges total enclosure and simulation, with the purpose of a renewed aesthetic education. Art, once again, becomes a place of social bonding and emotional education.²² But this bonding always presumes a fundamental exclusion. Technology has been the most obvious in this history. But, as we’ve seen throughout this book, there are other exclusions as well, some more insidious than the forgetting of technology and the forgetting of metaphysics.

The epistemology of empathy refers to how our knowledge of emotional, social bonds—bonds we more regularly term “affective”—can only be known through an instrument, a machine, a technology. The aesthetics of empathy refers to how the experience of this bond, the feeling of identification, the feeling of community, requires an exclusion, a beyond, something that cannot be experienced and must not be experienced for relation to be realized. “Affect” is based on the precondition of both, which it remakes into a metaphysical substance that both relies on, but cannot acknowledge, its own material history. When one leaves the Sorbonne, one can go south and make their way to the Panthéon, feeling-into the history of Western culture, an empathetic bonding mediated through art, a mediation linked with the legacies of the Enlightenment, its cultivation of subjectivity and rationality. Or, one can go north, and make their way to the Préfecture de Police, where instruments and measurements determine that link among emotion, empathy, and the carceral. In some sense, one can argue both directions are prisons of rationality. Yet this rationality is always underpinned by its negation: the irrational, the spiritual, the metaphysical. The Panthéon was originally designed to be the Church of Saint Genevieve. And across the street from the police is Notre-Dame Cathedral.