Optical Impersonality: Science, Images, and Literary Modernism

Afterword. Modernist Futurity: The “Creative Contagion” of Impersonality and Affect

The notion of a visual or tactile beauty that might be impersonal, dislinked from the need to present a firstperson self to the world, came as news to me—late, late news. But exciting! My fingers were very hungry to be handling a reality, a beauty, that wasn’t myself, wasn’t any self, and didn’t want to be. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Weather in Proust This book has intentionally not offered an affect theory of modernist impersonality . The terms and structures I’ve attributed to impersonality instead arise strictly from modernism and its scientific vernacular. But optical impersonality does constitute a sort of prehistory for current affect theory . And to turn to this connection now is to make what Brian Massumi has called a “trans-situational linkage” (239). Such a linkage involves a “reconstellation of concepts,” a process of extracting ideas from their usual relations in their home system and bringing them together instead with ideas from another system (17). Some of the most important ideas about affect come from Massumi himself, who is strongly influenced by Gilles Deleuze, and from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, who is more loosely influenced by the psychologist Silvan Tomkins’ Basic Emotions paradigm. Attending to the trans-situational linkage between impersonality and these particular thinkers reveals what happens to impersonality—its beliefs, concerns, and forms— after modernism. Without suggesting that impersonality and affect theory are synonymous, or even entirely isomorphic, this reconstellation points to avenues of new and future growth that may arise from their joint consideration . Afterword: Modernist Futurity The “Creative Contagion” of Impersonality and Affect Modernist Futurity 259 A Shared Visual Vernacular: Affect Theory’s Impersonality The “affect” of affect theory is perhaps best grasped by analogy to the difference between energy and matter. Affect, like energy, is a capacity that hasn’t yet been channeled to any particular purpose. As Eric Shouse puts it, affect is a “non-conscious experience of intensity,” a moment of “unformed and unstructured potential” (¶5). This “intensity” or “potential” is just as embodied as physical energy: it consists in correlated sets of responses involving facial muscles, the viscera, the skeleton, the respiratory system, vocalizations , and changes in blood flow that together register “the particular gradient . . . of stimulation impinging on the organism” and correspondingly augment or diminish the body’s capacity to act (¶6). In other words, affect includes both one’s degree of sensitivity to the world—that is, one’s capacity to be affected—and the degree of one’s ability to act in the world—that is, one’s ability to affect. With this meaning in mind, most of the characteristics that affect theorists assign to affect fall into place. As an intensity or potential, affect is about variability, movement, and futurity rather than a positioned body or psychological state. It’s unlike any particular action, arrival , or emotion because it exists before will and consciousness. In Massumi ’s terms, affect is an excess that’s not accounted for by the “‘discursive’ body” and “its signifying gestures” (2). As Massumi’s claim suggests, affect theory is typically taken as a riposte to poststructuralist theory. Teresa Brennan, however, has usefully situated it within a much longer intellectual history whose terms overlap with the history of impersonality. Brennan’s basic premise is that affect both undermines the supposed binary between self and world and suggests that subjects can be motivated by intentions that aren’t entirely their own but that are frequently owned after the fact. She argues that the idea of affect faded from scientific and philosophical discussion when “the individual, especially the biologically determined individual, came to the fore” in the eighteenth century, alongside the rise of “objectivity” (2). Affect wasn’t conducive to the establishment of this individual, who was formulated around the subject/ object divide. And this ill fit thus required a purging of affect: the objective subject was supposed to calculate more and feel, and even sense, less. Brennan maintains, moreover, that the heightened preoccupation with vision beginning in the eighteenth century—the siècle des lumières, or century of light—precipitated the declining interest in affect. True to that preoccupa- 260 Optical Impersonality tion, vision became the only sense to attain some sort of objective status, as its function at a distance seemed capable of keeping subject and object separate. The recent return to affect, Brennan thus concludes, requires and indeed facilitates a demotion of the individual...