awe

When we think about experiences of awe in our lives, we’re often drawn to big, unforgettable moments. Perhaps we remember being confronted with some powerful natural scene, like a view of a mountain range or the Grand Canyon. Or, maybe we think of some remarkable achievement, as when an Olympic athlete breaks a world record. In the most common sense of the word, to be “in awe” of something usually constitutes some special and memorable experience, one associated with strong feeling and that we may believe is especially meaningful. But what gives rise to that feeling? What is it about the relationship between the awed and the awesome that produces this affect?

Awe typically mediates between the feeling subject and some object which exceeds or overwhelms that subject (the “awesome”). This affect can either be felt in relation to some object that is physically greater or more powerful—in an explicitly bodily sense—or in relation to another subject whose action is considered great or virtuous. In either case, the effect on the subject is a feeling of being diminished or overpowered by the object of their awe. Depending on the situation that elicits the feeling of awe, it can be helpful to think of awe as accompanied with other affects, such as terror or admiration. The first combination, that of awe and terror, tends to refer to sublime experience when a subject is in awe at some thing (as when a person is awed by a view of the Grand Canyon). The latter pair, when awe is supplemented by admiration, applies to situations in which a subject is in awe at the actions of some other subject (as when a person is awed at seeing an athlete break a world record).

In traditional aesthetic accounts of the sublime, awe is accompanied by terror. The experience of awe and terror together in the sublime can be seen as a mediation between the experiencing subject and the objective world in which the objective world overwhelms the subject. For example, Lee Rozelle discusses what he calls the “ecosublime” in American literature as “awe and terror that occurs when literary figures experience the infinite complexity and contingency of place” (1). In the situation that Rozelle describes, literary figures marvel at the world around them and are affected with a sense of awe as this world overwhelms them. Still, while Rozelle suggests the subject feels awe in a sublime experience of place, the source of the affect is often displaced and attributed to an experience of divine presence. Here, awe and terror seem more distinct as awe tends toward a kind of reverence for the deity.

Although upholding the distinction between these two affects may seem unnecessary, the two are regularly kept apart discursively. We can see this opposition clearly in Emerson’s formulation for the sublime—“glad to the brink of fear”—where Emerson’s elation while “crossing a bare common” is associated with awe and opposed to (while it paradoxically complements) his sense of terror (10). The example of Emerson demonstrates the connection between divine presence and a species of the sublime, as Emerson describes his being as “part or particle of God” (10). Emerson’s felt experience of coming into contact with nature is a classic example that joins awe and terror in the sublime, showing how a subject ebbs ontologically in the face of an awing object.

We might also consider awe’s connection to admiration. In this case, awe and admiration commingle in when one subject feels that another is greater in some way. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith theorizes this relationship between admirer and person whose action is worthy of admiration. According to Smith, an individual whose reaction to a given situation—say, the sorrow at the death of a close friend—is worth of approbation if their reaction matches what others would see as a reasonable response to that feeling. If, however, the one experiencing sorrow somehow exceeds our expectations in reacting to the situation, for instance by being especially courageous and emotionally contained, that person’s actions are seen as superhuman and thus worthy of our admiration. To draw on a striking example of Smith’s, we may find it appropriate for a victim of torture to cry out in pain, but we are in awe of the victim who has been able to remain quiet and calm despite tremendous pain. As these examples reveal, the affect pairing of admiring awe often has to do with self-possession or containment of excess emotion. Thus, while we may couch our awe in terms of courage or virtue, ultimately the feeling arises from a recognition of power, force, or fortitude that exceeds humanity’s typical strength.

 Chase Ramsey

Works Cited:

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Nature. Essays and Lectures. Ed. Joel Porte. New York: Library of America, 1983. 5-49.

Rozelle, Lee. Environmental Awe and Terror from New World to Oddworld. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2006.

Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Penguin, 2009.

fear/dread

Fear is an anticipatory emotive response to the prospect of a terrible or terrifying event. It exists as a personally, historically, and socially conditioned amalgam of apprehension, uncertainty, and anxiety. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), the eighteenth-century moral philosopher Adam Smith catalogs fear among the “strongest motives” (66) of mankind and “the most furious passions” alongside hatred and resentment.

As an affective response, fear requires activating conditions. More precisely, its activation hinges on past experience and on current expectation of terror. Smith, for instance, describes fear as an imaginative passion that increases the subject’s anxiety about future suffering, as opposed to what actual experience. Adela Pinch suggests that the Gothic’s trademark imitation and repetition of certain images, thoughts, and phrases can provoke or intensify conditioned feelings of fear in response to their continual (though fictional) iteration. Particular events or images trigger the fear response, and the knowledge and anticipation of that experience heightens the response. J. Halberstam evaluates the literary and filmic technologies and (re)productions of fear, but elides Ann Radcliffe’s distinction between horror (a “low” form of fear that tends to manifest itself in visual or bodily terms) and terror (horror’s “high” counterpart that uses elements of the sublime, typically operating via obscurity and imagination) in favor of an investigation of the mechanics of the horrific brand of fear.

Because fear is, in many respects, a communal affective response not contained within the body, its transmission allows for empathetic connections among subjects. Smith, for example, argues that we can sympathize more with fear than with physical agony. If one has become acquainted with the object that occasions the passion (or its expression) of another, one may experience an equivalent emotion after recognizing it in another. It follows that persons who are not the immediate objects of a passion (e.g. anger) may still feel the fear of another by imaginatively placing themselves in the position of one threatened by such a passion.

Fear impacts our other emotions, actions, and relationships. As a “furious” and widespread passion, fear has the potential to influence geopolitical populations by eliciting a common response to specific triggers. Fear can also function as a means of criminal deterrence. Smith, like other legal theorists, asserts that, in a successful judicial system, criminals must be made to repent for their socially disruptive actions so that others, “through fear of the like punishment, may be terrified from being guilty of the like offence. The natural gratification of this passion tends, of its own accord, to produce all the political ends of punishment; the correction of the criminal, and the example to the public” (84). The agony stimulated in one person can elicit a wider fear that serves as general deterrence. Fear also motivates social adhesion as the dread of solitude typically compels individual persons to seek refuge in the protection of social group. Apprehensions of religious transgression, too, can provoke the creation of similarly conventional communities. Fear has the potential to balance hope or inspire sympathy and, in so doing, to regulate human nature.

While moderate fear can support social systems, its excess can pose a threat to those same structures. Smith shows how an overabundance of fear and anger is difficult to restrain and can thus undermine personal and social integrity. Thus, Smith follows ancient philosophers in insisting that one must control strong passions like fear and anger. While Smith calls for a command of both fear and anger, he includes a differentiating caveat: “Fear is contrary to anger, and is often the motive which restrains it . . . . The indulgence of anger is sometimes an object of vanity. That of fear never is” (283). At the same time, the dual experience of great fear and attraction can stimulate the awing effects of the sublime. Moderate fear, on the other hand, preserves an equilibrium between courage and cowardice and motivates the subject to adhere to convention.

Rebecca McCann

Works cited:

Halberstam, Judith. Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

Pinch, Adela. Strange Fits of Passion: Epistemologies of Emotion, Hume to Austen. Palo Alto: Stanford UP, 1999.

Smith, Adam. The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Ed. Ryan Patrick Hanley. New York: Penguin, 2009.

Tomkins, Sylvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.

affect/emotions

Most accounts of affect are broad enough to apply across diverse disciplines. In an attempt to further explore the human condition (that is, the ways in which we understand ourselves as well as how we interact with each other, physical objects, and situations), affect studies endeavors to identify the process through which human beings feel. With that said, in The Affect Theory Reader, a book dedicated to the affective body, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg emphasize the innumerable options of understanding the theory at hand:

“There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be. If anything, it is more tempting to imagine that there can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect: theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds” (3-4).

As Seigworth and Gregg suggest, affect theory, as an academic approach, continually blurs into several different fields and is still forming as a theoretical lens. Although the conceptualization of affect changes according to the field, the majority of scholars across disciplines agree upon the following details concerning affect theory: 1) Baruch Spinoza coined and framed the term affect; 2) affect is, at its base, a force that operates mainly at the non-conscious level; and 3) the two main views on affect categorize it as either “innate” or “relational,” sometimes both at the same time.

The evolution of affect theory begins in the seventeenth century when Spinoza introduced the term, “affect,” in his most renowned work, Ethics. For Spinoza, affect is both bodily and mental in origin. The study of affect can also be seen as having a pre-history in the concepts of sensibility, sentimentality, and romantic feelings. These phenomena first appear in creative works (usually sentimental, Romantic, and Gothic novels and poetry) and in theories of gender difference. Philosophers such as Adam Smith did not necessarily refer to affect as a specific philosophical theory of understanding, but rather as grounds for the “moral sentiments” of individuals. Smith posited that the emotions of one person could be felt by another, a transmission of emotions called sympathy. Smith fashioned a socially-theoretical foundation for understanding affect. He not only wrote about affective moral education as articulated through sympathy but also how the perception of such sympathy by fellow citizens solidified the individual’s relations with other individuals in the surrounding community. Hence, a subject wronged by another can rouse others in the group to rise against the offender because of the affective atmosphere generated by the social situation. Affect theorists do not necessarily invoke these philosophers but their works might be seen as the origins for theorizing affect’s power to explain human action. More recently, philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have expanded on Spinoza. Deleuze translates Spinoza’s ideas into an approach to the arts. To Deleuze, affect is not only a humanized relational force but also manifests within and as a work of art. One can thus talk about the affect of a single painting or novel. Deleuze even links artistic quality to the work’s capacity to produce new and unique affects.

As indicated above, affect scholars might be categorized according to two major strands, the innate and the relational. The innate approach to affect reads affective forces as stemming from and observed within the individual. This take interprets human affects as derived from a physical body shaped by psychological, biological, and /or physiological forces. For such intrinsic theorists, affect is founded on electrical processes naturally happening in the brain (psychological and/or biological), where individual faculties are genetically or evolutionarily fostered, along with the supposed ability of empathy of an individual. Scholars in the intrinsic school tend to describes such forces as drives, a term serves as an umbrella for psychological processes within the body. Psychoanalytic scholars usually study the intrinsic side of affect while sociological disciplines follow the extrinsic.

The relational approach, by contrast, insists on affect as enacted through the relationships between persons. These forces are understood to be the unseen atmosphere between conceptual bodies that incites physical or mental action. Such bodily interactions bear different forms: human-to-human, human-to-environment, human-to-object, or object-to-object. Affect aims to describe and map out such relations. For example, a relationist study might be interested in explaining a situation why one is able to walk into a room and feel the tension between the people already present. Affective forces are therefore understood to have transmissible qualities, according to the relationists. Especially within fields such as sociology, scholars look at affect as a transference of feelings between human beings in order to explain social phenomena such as crowd dynamics, sympathy, and empathy. Such processes help explain riots or the celebratory atmosphere at a football game. Other scholars may analyze the affective links between different objects (non-human/non-animal), for instance, a perspective along the lines of Feng Shui. No one of these approaches (innate or relational) is reserved for a specific discipline.

Affect, as an intangible force, is often described in terms of its intensity. Levels of strength shape the individual’s subsequent reactions towards that affect or feeling. For instance, the difference between tearing up (slight sniffling, flushed cheeks, along with a few tears) and sobbing (fully running nose, inability to properly breath, along with the choked coughs) as reactions to and expressions of sadness reflect the level of intensity of that sadness. The intensity-to-effects ratio can be analyzed by scholars despite how that individual is experiencing the affective force: intrinsically or relationally.

The distinction between affect and emotion is a major matter of dispute in the field. Some scholars consider affect as the theory of feeling, that is, if we accept the word “feeling” as separate from emotions—in that feeling is the unnamed force either inside or outside the body. In other words, some believe affect to be the cause of emotions in individuals (Massumi and Tomkins). Massumi views emotions as a fixed named form while affect is an immeasurable intensity. This distinction between affect and emotion mean there may be multiple forms of affect that eventually turn into a corresponding emotion or that there may be simply one affect that can potentially flow into different categories of emotions. Affect is often depicted as disconnected from consciousness, a force autonomous to the willed command of body and thought. Scholars are therefore looking at a force that seems to escape the realm of cognitive capture. As a result, affect is almost unanimously separated from the conventional lexicon of “emotions.” The terms “feelings,” “sensation,” and “sentiments,” however, tend to be used by several scholars in tandem with affect, in that they are considered to be unnamed forces.

This unnamed quality of affect proves to be problematic. As Seigworth and Gregg (among many other scholars) point out, affect theory focuses on something that can never be fully pinned down and examined, a constantly moving force. In an attempt to resolve this dilemma, many scholars lean towards describing the effects of affect, as if affects were synonymous with named emotions and their well-known symptoms. And yet in spite of such attempts, as Massumi asserts, “there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary for affect” (88). Since scholars do not possess the linguistic tools for the theory, they must analyze its effects in hopes to acquire a more thorough look at the underlying causes. Thus, this website presents articles explaining, through the lens of affect, emotional complexes such as shame, anger, fear, joy, excitement, awe, distress, and trauma. The approach to affect has thus adapted to the problem of the unnamable. But can we in fact effectively use words to describe something that is theoretically outside of language?

Jewel Williams

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Percept, Affect and Concept.” What is Philosophy? Trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. 163-199.

Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83-109.

Seigworth, Gregory & Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 1-28.

Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Economic Classic, 2013.

Tomkins, Sylvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.