Labanyi

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Jo Labanyi

DOING THINGS: EMOTION, AFFECT,

AND MATERIALITY

This paper considers some implications of the recent affective turn in culturalstudies, focusing on the ways in which it may help us explore the entanglement of thehuman with the material. This latter aspect has synergies with Georgina Dopico-Blacks exploration in this issue of the limits of the human. The overall drift of mypaper, as should become clear at the end, is to try to find ways of thinking beyond, oroutside of, representation. My discussion draws on the work of scholars in thehumanities and the social sciences (anthropology, communications); if the social

sciences underwent a cultural turn in the 1970s, the humanities can profit todayfrom culturally-oriented research in the social sciences. The paper is entirelyexploratory. It is intended as a stimulus to new forms of research which, to myknowledge, have not been tried in Spanish studies*at least, not with explicitreflection on the issues involved.

My title Doing Things is intended in two senses: that of doing things and thatof doing things. The first sense*doing things*raises the question of what itmight mean to think of emotions as practices, rather than as states that exist inside theself and are often regarded as properties of the self. Thus, following Sara Ahmeds TheCultural Politics of Emotion, I want to consider not what emotions are but what they do

(4). Here I am influenced by anthropology as a discipline which studies the symbolicsystems constituted by social practices. Subjectivity*a term used regularly byliterary and cultural critics*is not a word used by anthropologists, since they areconcerned with the behavior of groups, and since the methodology of participantobservation allows access to what individuals are feeling only insofar as it isexternalized through social practice.1 I do not propose that we abandon the study ofsubjectivity, but would like to argue for a concept of subjectivity that is based onrelationality with others and with things. That means paying attention to feelings aswell as ideas, and viewing feelings, not as properties of the self, but as producedthrough the interaction between self and world. And it means seeing that interaction,

not as the coming together of two separate entities, but as a process of entanglementin which boundaries do not hold. It also means taking into account not only consciousfeelings, but also what is felt at the level of the body, questioning the body/minddivide.

The other sense of my title*Doing things*is concerned with how we might,as cultural scholars, study materiality, with reference not just to bodily processes, butalso to the material world outside. The aim would be to get beyond thinking aboutour relationship to things in terms of a subject/object divide, which puts agency onone side of the divide (our side) and supposes that things exist solely as objects tobe mastered. In this respect, I am again influenced by anthropology, in whichmaterial culture has become an important field; it is a topic which has also been takenon board by historians. A question here is whether it is only possible to study things in

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with this: for example, the anthropologist Arjun Appadurais The Social Life of Things(1988) or the historian Lisa Jardines Worldly Goods: A New History of the Renaissance(1996), both of which consider how commodities circulate. I should like to considerwhat it might mean to study what things themselves do*what we might call doing

things-that-do-things.I will devote most of this paper to an overview of recent theorizations of affect

in English-language cultural theory, since this is the least familiar of my three terms,and since it stands as a midway point between, and thus in relationship to, the othertwo more readily graspable terms: emotion and materiality. I shall be brief in mydiscussion of emotion (I am keenly aware of how much more could be said), focusingon the ways in which it is distinct from affect. After discussing affect, I shall givea brief review of recent theorizations of materiality.

Although affect is often used as if it were synonymous with emotion (anddictionary definitions support that interchangeability), in recent English-language

cultural theory it has taken on a distinct meaning borrowed from cognitive science.This is a problem for scholars working in Spanish studies, since in Spanish afectoremains equivalent to sentimiento (emotion). Curiously, the Spanish emocioncomes closer to what is meant by affect in its restricted English sense, sinceemocion designates excitement; that is, a strong response to a stimulus (as inQue emocion!). Emotions (in the English sense) are by definition conscious:if I feel afraid, I am aware of feeling afraid, and I have a word to give to thatemotion: fear. (Of course, different languages classify emotions differently.)Emotions additionally involve judgment: hate, love, fear express moral attitudes(Ahmed 1956). As defined by Teresa Brennan in The Transmission of Affect (2004),

feeling is an umbrella term straddling emotion and physical sensation (5). Likeemotion, feeling is conscious*one feels it*and also involves a degree of

judgment since it does not just register sensory information but interprets it (5). Bycontrast, affect is the bodys response to stimuli at a precognitive and prelinguisticlevel. Nonetheless, Brennan insists that affect is not value free; she defines it as thephysiological shift accompanying a judgment (5).

In his path-breaking Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (2002),communications scholar Brian Massumi defines affect as intensity*an arousal thatcan be measured physiologically but which happens so fast that consciousness cannotregister it. Once a conscious response kicks in (half a second later, according toneurological research), we are in the realm of sensation (awareness of the physicalexperience, for example, of fear) and, following shortly after, emotion (the reflectiveacknowledgment I am afraid). Emotion is thus, in practice, an amalgam of feeling andthought*though the element of judgment involved in sensation and even affect makes itdifficult to call them entirely thought-free. It is hard to find a vocabulary to talk of thekind of judgments made by affect in that half second preceding conscious response: this isa kind ofthinking done by the body and not the mind. As Brennan stresses (136, 141),by comparison with affect, conscious thought*traditionally privileged*is slow.Affect, sensation, and emotion thus occupy different points on a continuum going frombody to mind, each having a different temporality. All of them involve judgment in someway; sensation and emotion are felt consciously; and emotion forms a further continuumwith reason in that both are forms of conscious moral thinking.2 As a neurological

2 2 4 J O U R N A L O F S P A N I S H C U L T U R A L S T U D I E S

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Freudian unconscious, which consists of repressed emotions, since affect, not havingreached consciousness, cannot be repressed; it is preconscious. Affect is, in a way,matter in motion since it moves the body*quite literally if it makes us startrunning away from the bear that has made us afraid, in that half-second before we

become conscious of the physical sensation of fear, which in turn makes possible thereflection I am afraid (Ahmeds example, 78).

As Michael Hardt notes in his introduction to Patricia Cloughs edited volume TheAffective Turn (2007), affect has become a current object of study because it demonstratesthe impossibility of thinking of body and mind as separate (ix). Clough and Massumitrace the genealogy of affect back through the work of Deleuze and Guattari to Bergsonand Spinoza (Clough 203; Massumi 17). Affect also complicates the notion of agency: itis not a passive Pavlovian response to an external stimulus*as we have seen, it involves akind of judgment enacted at the level of the body*but, being preconscious andprelinguistic, it cannot be directed by reasoned argument. Affect requires a view of the

body, not as an organic closed system (as in Freud), but as something close to Deleuzeand Guattaris concept of a machinic assemblage (Clough 112), radically open to theworld*that is, existing in a self-world continuum in which the terms subject andobject make no sense. In effect, the neurological study of affect shows the body to bean information system whose potential is greater than that of consciousness. Massumicalls this zone of potentiality the virtual, located in that half-second before responsebecomes conscious (30)*that is, before stimulus and response become perceived asreal and consciousness closes down the bodys defenses. The belatedness ofconsciousness suggests a need to revise psychoanalytical interpretations of thebelatedness of trauma.3 Massumi (5) observes that affect is the real-material-but-

incorporeal; it is to the body what energy is to matter. This real-material-but-incorporeal dimension of the body cannot be called a thing for, in Massumis neatformulation: A thing is when it isnt doing (6). Affect is doing all the time, though atdifferent levels and rhythms of intensity. (The last part of this paper will challengeMassumis suggestion that things dont do; nevertheless, his definition of things iscorrect inasmuch as they are inanimate matter.)

Massumi notes that affect does not have a straightforward relation to content, norto emotion. He describes a neurological experiment with children, wired up whilewatching three versions of a short film*one wordless, one with purely factual voice-over, one with a voice-over incorporating expressions of emotion*and interviewedafter the screening (23

5). When asked which scenes they had liked the most, thechildren came up with the scenes they had found most scary, contradicting*asMassumi notes*Freuds supposition that pleasure is linked to the drive for stasis(235). The experiment showed that the emotional version was the one the childrenremembered best (and also found pleasurable). But the one they rated the mostpleasurable of all (meaning the scariest) was the wordless version, which produced thegreatest bodily response at the level of the skin: that is, at the level of interface withthe outside world. Curiously, the factual version*least liked and least re-membered*was the one that produced the greatest bodily response in terms ofquickened heartbeat and deep breathing. Massumi attributes this agitated bodilyresponse to the impact of (conscious) narrative expectations set up by the factualvoice-over. While accepting this divided physiological response, Massumi concludes

E M O T I O N , A F F E C T, A N D M A T E R I A L I T Y 225

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it is a response to a wordless version. The fact that the emotional version, while themost remembered, was the one that produced the least bodily arousal leads Massumito claim a disconnect between emotion and affect, concluding that they followdifferent paths and pertain to different orders (27).

Massumi notes the tendency in contemporary cultural theory to see the body asalways already mediated; that is, as a discursive body (2) constituted throughtechnologies of knowledge production. Affect, being outside of discourse, presents achallenge to Foucauldian theories of biopolitics. (I will later ask whether affect reallyis as non-discursive as Massumi gives to understand.) As Massumi observes, latecapitalist culture may have seen a loss of belief but it is characterized by a surfeit ofaffect. Thus, he pleads: Much could be gained by integrating the dimensionof intensity into cultural theory (27). Massumi warns that the incorporation of affectinto cultural theory would mean accepting the collapse of structured distinction intointensity, of rules into paradox*something to be welcomed since structure is that

explanatory heaven (. . .

) where nothing ever happens (27). But, as he notes: Theproblem is that there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect (27).Massumis own vocabulary comes primarily from a mix of Deleuze, cognitive science,and communications theory. He does, however, hold out some hope, observing that,while one cannot observe a force, one can observe its effects: Newton did not seegravity. He felt its effect: a pain in the head (160). Noting that to work on affect is towork on relationality (234), Massumi suggests: The difference[s] between minds,bodies, and objects are perhaps not as essential as philosophers stuck on thesubjective-objective divide make them out to be (201). In his final chapter, heattempts an analysis of the mystique of Frank Sinatra as popular singer, in terms of his

ability to turn his body movements into a carnal melody that repeated at a sensiblelevel the linguistic content of his lyrics (249). This is an analysis of expressive cultureas embodiment, communicable in pre-cognitive terms through what Massumi callslifestyle contagion (250).

Teresa Brennans The Transmission of Affect (2004) is concerned specifically withthe ways in which affect breaks down the subject/object divide, making possible anethics of relationality. Affect means to be affected by and to affect; one persons affectaffects others. Brennan seizes on the Spanish expression of sympathy Lo siento as anexample of this ability to feel what others are feeling, arguing that neurologicalresearch into affect shows that we are wired up to feel with others if we can stopthinking of the self as a bounded subject (123). This also means ceasing to privilegevision over the other senses, since vision is what constructs the person who sees assubject and the person seen as object (179, 150). As Brennan puts it, thetheorization of affect shows that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies(6). Indeed, reversing the traditional notion that thought is objective because it isimpersonal, she argues that: Thoughts, indeed, appear more individual or personalthan affects (7).

Brennans book contains some interesting discussion of how thinking aboutemotion has changed over the centuries, noting that the pre-Enlightenment concept ofthe passions had much in common with the contemporary theorization of affect,inasmuch as it supposed that the passions entered the body from outside: thepassions were bodily phenomena that one suffered and it was taken for granted


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the autonomous individual, reinforced by the privileging of vision over the othersenses, that the term passions gave way to sentiments or emotions, viewed asconstituent elements of an authentic, bounded self. The notion of transmissionwould be revived in the late nineteenth century but in the pathological form of the

primitive contagion that drives crowd behavior (51

4). Nevertheless, as Brennanobserves, for the Enlightenment, sensibility went hand in hand with reason as acivilizing force. David Hume picked up on Adam Smiths The Theory of Moral Sentiments(1759) to argue that all ethics are based on passion or emotion, since sentiment, as areflective stance on what one feels, involves moral judgment (1045). Passion,emotion, and sentiment are here used interchangeably, as Brennan notes (105).Starting with Romanticism and increasing in the course of the nineteenth century, amajor shift occurs as reason and sentiment come to be seen as in conflict; this is notthe same as the premodern notion of the conflict between reason and passion since, inthe earlier period, passion was not our true nature (Brennan 105) but came fromwithout. The collaborative research project Emotional Cultures in Spain from theEnlightenment to the present which I co-direct with Elena Delgado (University ofIllinois at Urbana-Champaign) and Pura Fernandez (CSIC, Madrid), bringing togetheran interdisciplinary team of scholars from the US and Spain, has shown how theincreasing dissociation of reason and emotion in the course of the nineteenth centuryaffected a range of cultural fields.

Having explored the continuum that runs from emotion to materiality, with affectoccupying the complex middle ground of the real-material-but-incorporeal, I willmove now to recent theorizations of materiality*what the critic of American

literature Bill Brown has called thing theory (Things 1

22). There is sometimes afine line between the study of objects in order to disclose the social practices thatdetermine their disposition in time and space, and the study of objects in order toshow how they produce the subjectivities of the humans with which they intersect.Daniel Millers ethnographic study of the objects in the homes of the diverseinhabitants of a London street, The Comfort of Things (2008), claims both to revealhow people express themselves through their possessions and the role of objectsin our relationships, both to each other and to ourselves (6).4 This second claimechoes the anthropologist Marilyn Stratherns well-known proposition, in her study ofa Melanesian gift economy, that the gift is what constitutes the partners in the

exchange as social persons in the first place (cited in Henare, Holbraad and Wastell19). In his edited volume Materiality, Daniel Miller (editor of the journal MaterialCulture) notes that in most of the religions that dominate recorded history ( . . . )[w]isdom has been accredited to those who claim that materiality represents themerely apparent, behind which lies that which is real (1). Such a supposition, sharedby many world religions and not just the legacy of a Western Platonic tradition, formsthe basis of a theory of representation: the world is not simply what it is but a cipherof a higher reality. Examinations of material culture that seek to prise out the humanrelations behind things could be said to partake of the same representationalparadigm, whereby things always represent something else (this, for example,underlies much analysis ofmise-en-scene in film studies, especially in melodrama wheremise-en-scene is theorized as a projection of repressed emotion). Marxs commodity


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worshipped as a way of not seeing the all-too-material labor relations that produce all-too-material artefacts.

Much has been written on fetishism in relation to material culture; I will limit myselfhere to Peter Stallybrasss brilliant re-reading of Marx in his essay Marxs Coat.

Drawing on the earlier work of the anthropologist William Pietz, Stallybrass notes thatthe term fetish derives from the word feitico used by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Portuguese traders in West Africa to refer to objects which the indigenouspeoples refused to sell, thereby rejecting the capitalist market economy based onabstract monetary value. Pietz notes how the concept of the fetish was taken up byEnlightenment thinkers because it offered a non-deist explanation of the origins ofreligion. In these eighteenth-century readings fetishism became interpreted, not as theattachment of value to things for what they are rather than for their monetary value, butas a superstitious belief that inanimate things could have animate properties. ForEnlightenment thinkers, fetishism*the worship of things*was the definitive mistake

of the pre-enlightened mind (Pietz 139): that is, a category confusion which refuses thebinary opposition person/thing (or subject/object). Pietz notes how subsequenttheorizations of the fetish progressively dematerialized it, making a discourse aboutthings into a discourse about something else, the salient examples being late nineteenth-century sexological interpretations of fetishism, and Baudrillards late twentieth-century semiological reading which makes fetishism an idolatry of signs (1234).Stallybrass suggests that Marxs theory of commodity fetishism was one of his leastunderstood jokes (184), ridicul[ing] a society that thought it had surpassed the mereworship of objects supposedly characteristic ofprimitive religions (186). Stallybrass,like Pietz, sees Marxs theory of fetishism as an attempt to return to the original sense of

fetishism as the attribution of value to things on account of their materiality: what, in afamous quote, Marx called the religion of sensuous desire (Pietz 133). In a joke of hisown, Stallybrass argues that Marx wrote Capital (the text in which he elaborated histheory of commodity fetishism) so as to give the coat back to its owner (187); that is,in order to redeem his overcoat, cherished for its material qualities, from its repeatedtrips to the pawnbroker where it became converted into abstract exchange value. Incontrasting a negative capitalist fetishization of monetary value with a positive pre-capitalist worship of things for their materiality, Marx*in Stallybrasss reading*demolished the subject/object distinction on which modernity depends.

Daniel Miller echoes Marxs materialist analysis when he claims that it isphilosophically incorrect to talk of subjects and objects since our humanity is notprior to what it creates (Materiality10). Indeed he argues, following Latour, that thereis a sense in which one can talk of the agency of things, as when a computer crashes or alandmine kills: Where material forms have consequences for people that areautonomous from human agency, they may be said to possess the agency that causesthese effects (Materiality11). Miller also echoes Marxs materialist reading of things*valued for their material qualities and not as a cipher of something else*when he arguesagainst representational readings of material culture that assume that objects representpeople: what he calls the tyranny of the subject (Materiality 29). Decrying thetendency to assume that a material form makes manifest some underlying presencewhich accounts for that which is apparent, he proclaims, the clothes have noemperor (Materiality29). For, he continues, if your very understanding of the nature


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respect to the nature of human action and history as merely material culture (Materiality31). This last phrase resonates with the philosopher Simon Critchleys eloquent homageto the poet Wallace Stevens, entitled Things Merely Are.

The principal theorist of non-representational theory is the cultural geographer

Nigel Thrift, whose book Non-Representational Theory: Space/Politics/Affect (2008)explores ways of analyzing everyday life in terms of what he calls the geography ofwhat happens (2). This means exploring the materiality of experience: somethingthat is continuously changing since the human sensorium is constantly being re-invented and what is experienced as experience is itself variable (2). Thrifts aimis to capture life in movement, by studying persons as forces rather than subjects*forces being relational rather than existing in the individual. This is a performativeconcept of culture which includes the precognitive, since consciousness seems to bea very poor thing indeed (6). Thrift calls for modes of perception that are anti-biographical: Biography did to the dead what Freud feared that psychoanalysismight do to the living. Instead I want to substitute a material schematism in which theworld is made up of all sorts of things brought in to [sic] relation with each other bymany and various spaces through a continuous and largely involuntary process ofencounter, and the violent training that such encounter forces (78). This meansconsidering the human body as not separate from the thing world (10). Thriftacknowledges the importance of not idealizing this world of swirling affect, sinceembodiment can involve negative experiences, in which not everything is intensity*indeed, not all intensity is nice. In keeping with his attempt to get beyondrepresentational thinking, Thrift proposes to question the divide between theory and

practice by using practice to theorize (22). Consequently, Thrift defines affect as akind of non-reflective thought: thought in action (175). He is similarly concernedwith the doing of emotions, noting that, although conscious, they are largely non-representational since they tend to be ways of expressing something going on thattalk cannot grasp (176). Since emotions come from encounters with the world,rather than from within, to be emotional is, literally, to be beside oneself (180).Thrifts example of a practice that generates theory is the video-art of Bill Viola (1937), not coincidentally since the video image moves at a speed which allow only afraction of what impacts on the brain to be experienced consciously (this is true evenof the 24 frames per second of pre-digital 35 mm film). Digital media, as Mike

Featherstone notes in a 2010 special issue ofBody & Societyon Affect, allow one to slowdown the image to observe what, at the normal speed, is not perceived but felt at apre-cognitive level (199). Featherstone suggestively takes as his example of affectiveintensity the charisma communicated by movie stars: It is the sense of energy, of aforce, of a change of register*an intensity. It is an unstructured non-consciousexperience transmitted between bodies, which has the capacity to create affectiveresonances below the threshold of articulated meaning (1989).

As cultural scholars, then, how might we benefit from this new interest in thenon-representational*a new interest in emotions, affects, and things, and what theydo? Its relevance for the analysis of cultural practices is clear*and more work isneeded in Spanish cultural studies on practices rather than texts. It is less immediatelyobvious how this new interest in the non-representational might help us talk about


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the lens of representation (representation of what?) but as examples of expressiveculture*the term used in performance studies as well as anthropology.

To analyze the experience of watching a film in terms of affect*levels ofintensity*is not so difficult. Since the mid-1990s, thanks to the work of Steven Shaviro

(The Cinematic Body), Laura Marks (The Skin of the Film), and Giuliana Bruno (Atlas ofEmotion), a key concept in cinema studies has been the haptic*Deleuzes term for thetactility of vision. Contrary to the earlier critical paradigm of gaze theory, which saw thecinematic gaze as an objectifying tool of control, theories of the haptic suppose thatviewers abandon themselves corporeally to the flow of images on screen. The concept ofthe haptic can also be productive for analyzing still images*after all, Deleuze firsttheorized the term in his reflections on the paintings of Francis Bacon. But what would itmean to analyze print culture in terms of affect? I see no reason why this should not bepossible*particularly in the case of literary texts, since literary language depends onsurprise effects. To analyze a literary text in terms of affect would mean exploring the

ways in which it offers forms of embodied knowledge. This kind of reading ought toproduce a renewed interest in poetry, whose rhythms impact on us with particularintensity; in recent decades, there has been a return to the notion of the poet asperformer and not simply as author. Study of affect*intensity*would certainlyrequire drama to be studied as performance and not as text. It would also allow criticalrevaluation of sensationalist popular literature like the nineteenth-century follet n andthe early twentieth-century mass-produced novela corta. But even classic realist novelsaffect us not only cognitively but also as a patterning of varying levels of intensity. I amnot, of course, suggesting that we abandon thinking about the meaning of texts:structuralism tried to prescribe that when I was a student in the 1960s, fortunately with

short-lived effects. If structuralism made us think about what texts are rather thanwhat texts mean, the affective turn can make us attentive to what texts do*andwhat texts do is communicate all manner of things. So affect takes us back to meaning,but to forms of meaning that are not restricted to the cognitive (the cognitive has beenthe focus of most reader response theory, with the notable exception of the later BarthesofThe Pleasure of the Text and Camera Lucida).

What would require some thought is how this kind of reading of cultural texts interms of intensities might contribute to cultural analysis in the sense of exploration ofhow texts intersect with broader cultural processes in a particular historical momentand place. First one has to deal with the problem that affect, being precognitive, is*according to Massumi

*

outside of discourse. Or is it? That depends how oneconceives of the body. Body memory, for example, is a well established concept in thesocial sciences, which supposes that bodies learn certain habits through repetition; thisis a process that can take place only within specific cultural constraints (Connerton). Itis also important to remember that all the points on the bodymind continuum*affect/sensation/emotion/reasoned argument*are entangled with each other, eventhough, as responses to external stimuli, they occur in a temporal sequence, withaffect kicking in first and reasoned argument last. Massumis insistence that affect andemotion obey different orders warns us not to establish a mechanical causal sequencebetween affect and the sensations and emotions that follow; nevertheless, if affect canbe studied through its effects, those effects impact on sensation and emotion, which inturn can impact on reasoned argument. Perhaps we are in the presence of the marks


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or indeed at the level of reasoned argument*what we refer to as passionateconviction, for reason and emotion cannot be kept separate, as Martha Nussbaumargues.5 One thinks here of Carl Schmitts concept of political intensity, exploredsuggestively in this issue by Alberto Moreiras. Since affect, sensation, emotion,

and reason are all responses to the outside world, and*

as previously argued*

allinvolve a measure of judgment, it is logical to assume that they are, at least in part,culturally specific.

Beyond the study of intensities, it is clear how attention to textures of emotioncan tell us much about the cultural specificity of a historical period*this is, after all,what Raymond Williams (one of the founders of British cultural studies, whose workhas been hugely influential in Latin America) meant when he coined the phrasestructure of feeling in 1961.6 Ann Laura Stoler has demonstrated, with reference tothe former Dutch East Indies, how colonial archives, despite appearing at first sight tobe mere repositories of information, can tell us a huge amount about the emotional

life of both colonizers and colonized, provided one knows how to read in between thelines. Justus Nielands recent Feeling Modern, which takes Massumis work on affectinto account, argues that modernist culture exalts feelings as public products ofmodernity rather than as properties of the self. Nielands book does not mention theSpanish avant-garde, which could profitably be explored in the same vein. The Spanishavant-garde is also fertile ground for analysis of the presence and function of things incultural texts. It is a commonplace to talk of the importance of Spanish artifacts in thecubist collages of Picasso and Gris; why is there, to my knowledge, no study of thingsin Spanish avant-garde literary texts? Ramon Gomez de la Sernas El Rastro, forexample, questions the subject/object divide by dehumanizing persons and animating

things, as does Francisco Ayalas Cazador en el alba, and indeed Garca Lorcas Poeta enNueva York*this is something much more fundamental and exciting than the mererecognition of urban alienation. Rachel Moores insights into Eisensteins andEpsteins fascination with modern film technologys potential for the recreation ofsavage thought (primitive animism) by giving life to things has not, to myknowledge, been taken up by scholars of early Spanish cinema, despite the fact thatBunuel trained with Epstein. Although there is in Spanish studies an establishedtradition of scholarship on the history of the book as material object (albeit based onempirical data rather than cultural analysis), there is no equivalent to Bill Brownsexploration, in his book A Sense of Things, of the cultural meanings of things in latenineteenth- and early twentieth-century American literature. Above all, attention tothe cultural role of emotions and things could do a great deal to put Spains woefullyunderstudied eighteenth century back on the map, since this is a key period for theretooling of sentiment and redefinition of the self in terms of personal property,including ones emotions as personal property. Studies of how the various Spanishterms for emotions have altered over time would also make a hugely valuablecontribution to cultural understanding.

Earlier in this paper I drew a distinction between cultural practices and culturaltexts, as two different objects of analysis in cultural studies. But the above suggestions forfuture work involve treating cultural texts as cultural practices. To treat culturalpractices as cultural texts, as became fashionable with the structuralist proposal that allforms of culture (and even the unconscious) were structured like a language, is no longer


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would, I suggest, be productive. Above all, it would show that cultural texts are thingsthat do things: that is, things that have the capacity to affect us.

Notes

1 In practice, anthropological interviews*especially when they elicit life storynarratives*can be used as a basis for the study of subjectivity, but that is not thefocus usually adopted.

2 Martha Nussbaum (Loves Knowledge; Upheavals of Thought) has insisted on the conceptof emotional intelligence. See also Carol Gilligans conclusions, based onpsychological research, that girls tend to make moral judgments based onrelationality (ethics of care) while boys tend to make moral judgments basedon the abstract principle of the highest good of the individual (ethics of rights).

Gilligans work has prompted a strand of feminist legal theory advocating therethinking of legal principles in terms of an ethics of care.3 For an attempt to think through trauma in terms of affect, see Clough (134) and

Callard and Papoulias (2536).4 See also Millers recently published Stuff.5 See also Goodwin, Jasper, and Pollettas edited volume Passionate Politics.6 Williams On Structure of Feeling, originally published in The Long Revolution, is

reprinted as Chapter 1 of Jennifer Harding and E. Deidre Pribrams excellentanthology Emotions: A Cultural Reader. The volume brings together key texts from awide range of disciplines across the humanities and social sciences.

Works cited

Ahmed, Sara. The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge, 2004.Appadurai, Arjun. The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1988.Ayala, Francisco. Cazador en el alba. Seville: Renacimiento, 2006.Barthes, Roland. The Pleasure of the Text. New York: Hill and Wang, 1975. (French

original 1973).***. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. 2nd ed. Hill and Wang, 1982. (French

original 1980).Brennan, Teresa. The Transmission of Affect. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004.Brown, Bill. A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature. Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago, 2003.***, ed. Things. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2004.Bruno, Giuliana. Atlas of Emotion: Journeys in Art, Architecture, and Film. New York: Verso,

2002.Callard, Felicity and Constantina Papoulias. Affect and Embodiment. Memory: Histories,

Theories, Debates. Ed. Susannah Radstone and Bill Schwarz. New York: FordhamUniversity Press, 2010. 24662.

Clough, Patricia Ticineto. The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Durham, NC: DukeUniversity Press, 2007.

C t P l H S i ti R b C b id C b id U i it P 1989


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Critchley, Simon. Things Merely Are: Philosophy in the Poetry of Wallace Stevens. Abingdon:Routledge, 2005.

Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Minneapolis, MN: University ofMinnesota Press, 2003. (French original 1981).

Featherstone, Mike. Body, Image, and Affect in Consumer Culture. Affect. Ed. LisaBlackman and Couze Venn. Special issue of Body & Society 16.1 (2010): 193221.

Garca Lorca, Federico. Poeta en Nueva York. Ed. Mara Clementa Millan. Madrid: Catedra,1989.

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