The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance

1. From Dürer’s Angel to Harlow’s Monkey

34 1. From Dürer’s Angel to Harlow’s Monkey Hanging the Head Melancholy arises through the composition and recomposition of bodies: substances flowing, heating, and cooling within the somatic interior, limbs and extremities falling into attitudes or taking up postures, skin surfaces growing taut or slack, tiny expressive muscle systems arranging themselves into legible states of display. Over time and across culture, the smooth spectrum of bodily affect is territorialized into a striated repertoire of characteristic zones. These zones are given names and classified into emotions, a historical and material process of inscription which belies the volatility and fluctuation of its embodied support.1 Across a chasm, presentation and representation presume and reinforce each other. We cannot create a picture of a body experiencing an emotional state without knowing what an emotion looks like in the first place. Between psyche and soma there falls the shadow of culture, which crafts conventions, taxonomies , and ready-to-hand stereotypes. The mutually reinforcing tasks of emotional recognition and emotional representation depend upon the mastery of these conventions, and presume an implicit causal circuit of expressive resemblance between interior states and exterior postures. Inner and outer are expected to move as one. In a foundational theoretical articulation of the principles that were to guide Renaissance painting of the emotions, Leon Battista Alberti’s Della pittura (1435) states this principle of inner/outer correspondence explicitly: The movements of the soul are made known by the movements of the body. Care and thought weigh so heavily that a sad person stands with his From Dürer’s Angel to Harlow’s Monkey 35 forces and his feelings as if dulled, holding himself feebly and tiredly on his pallid and poorly sustained members. In the melancholy the forehead is wrinkled, the head drooping, all members fall as if tired and neglected.2 Melancholy’s legibility is simply one subsection of a broader taxonomy of passionate signs, but melancholy complicates the implied relationship between the soul and the body. For Alberti, melancholy shows up as an apparent slump in the body’s capacity for energy, force, and motion. It is a slump that redirects our attention to an implied interior space of perturbed, sad passions: the soul activated by the very force that disables the body, making it at once an-expressive and extra-expressive. Neglect of the body connotes a soul turned in retreat upon itself, and the drooping head is the persistent index of this passage inward. What is it, exactly, that we witness when we see someone as a melancholic ? How did melancholy individuals show up for their early modern spectators and how do they show up for us today? To the extent that I am engaged in a redescription of the experience of witnessing melancholy, I am engaged in a phenomenological description of what it means to look at paintings and watch plays and read prose and see or hear an individual sitter , character, or narrator within those artistic forms as a melancholic. Here visual recognition, clinical observation, medical diagnosis, scholarly interpretation , and playgoing spectatorship all dovetail. They are the means through which someone shows up as melancholic for an onlooker, in an artwork, or simply in a person who stands before us. Wittgenstein, in a handy term of art, called this experience “seeing as,” or aspectual seeing: “I contemplate a face, and then suddenly notice its likeness to another face. I see that it has not changed; and yet I see it differently. I call this experience ‘noticing an aspect’. [ . . . ] the flashing of an aspect on us seems half visual experience, half thought. [ . . . ]”3 This is true not only for Wittgenstein’s celebrated optical illusions and duck-rabbits but also in everyday experiences of looking at bodies in motion, and seeing the play of emotional life across the given structure of the body: Might I not [ . . . ] have a purely visual concept of a hesitant posture, or a timid face? Such a concept would be comparable with “major” and “minor” which certainly have emotional value, but can also be used purely to describe a perceived structure.4 36 From Dürer’s Angel to Harlow’s Monkey Such splitting of the perceptual difference between a formal arrangement (anatomy) and an expressive modality (posture) may at first glance seem merely recondite. Yet it can also help us to reactivate the mystery of how we perceive affect in others; Wittgenstein’s musical...