Neither our expressions nor our emotions are unique to human beings; other animals have some of the same emotions, and some of the expressions shown by animals ressemble our own. For Darwin, "He who admits on general grounds that the structure and habits of all animals have been gradually evolved, will look at the whole subject of expression in a new and interesting light." (Introduction to First Edition) Thus, while the illustrations below are found in the chapter on "Special Expressions of Animals", Darwin points out at the outset that "With mankind some expressions, such as the bristling of the hair under the influence of extreme terror, or the uncovering of the teeth under that of furious rage, can hardly be understood, except on the belief that man once existed in a much lower and animal-like condition." (intro.)
In previous centuries, facial expressions had been explained in terms of rhetoric or language, as in Charles Le Brun's 1698 treatise on the expression of the passions. Furthermore, most studies of facial expression were part of the study of physignomy -- the recognition of character through the study of the permanent forms of the features.
Did Darwin's treatise bypass language and extend expression across species? Or did his work, as some sholars have suggested, indicate a split status in the human face, becoming simultaneously a symptom of an organism's anatomical and physiological functioning and, in its relative impenetrability, the mark of the success or failure of a process of self-mastery and control implicit in the social construction of a normative individual? (Jean-Jacques Courtine and Claudine Haroche, Histoire du visage: Exprimer et taire ses émotions, ref. in J. Crary Suspensions of Perception, p.99)
Modern accounts of expression recognise cultural "display rules" that regulate the expressions of emotion. The anthropologist Paul Eckman filmed the expressions of American and Japanese students as they watched gruesome footage of a primitive puberty rite. When the white-coated experimenter was in the room, Japanese students smiled politely during scenes that made the Americans recoil in horror. But when the subjects were alone, the Japanese and American faces were equally horrified. Although emotional expression is not linguistic, it is nonetheless communicative, and is expressive of internal states.
Do animals distinguish between public and private?
affect versus emotion?
Sigmund Freud related affect to instinct. He viewed affect as the qualitative expression of the quantity of instinctual energy and of its fluctuations. (Laplance and Pontalis)
In The Interpersonal World of the Infant, the child psychologist Daniel Stern describes infancy primarily in terms of affect. Stern describes infant experience as more unified and global than that of adults. According to Stern, infants "take sensations, perceptions, actions, cognitions, internal states of motivation, and states of consciousness, and experience them directly in terms of intensities, shapes, temporal patterns, vitality affects, categorical affects, and hedonic tones. (p.67) According to Stern, early in life, affects are both the primary medium and the primary subject of communication. Stern distinguishes "vitality affects" from "categorial affects." The former often take the form of a "rush." They are about a way of feeling, not a specific content of feeling. Music and dance convey vitality affects. For Stern, affective experiences enter the intersubjective domain through "affect attunement," primarily, but not exclusively in the mother/infant dyad.
Stern's descriptions of affect ressemble Deleuze and Guattari's references to "intensities." (see smooth/striated) In "the autonomy of affect," Brian Massumi takes up Deleuze's identification of affect with "intensity," and opposes affect to emotion. For Massumi, emotion is qualified intensity -- "the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, into narrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning." Emotion expresses the "capture and closure" of affect, as well as the fact that "something has always and again escaped."This escape of affect is "the perception of one's own vitality, the sense of one's aliveness." ("The Autonomy of Affect, in Observing Complexity, p.285)
In Massumi's account, emotion and affect have different logics, and cultural theory would benefit from "an asignifying philosophy of affect." ( p.277.) Massumi takes issue with Frederic Jameson's claims about the "waning of affect." (see below) Instead, he cla ims that "our condition is characterized by a surfeit of it." With reference to Simondon's concepts of "implicit form," (see form / matter ) Massumi identifies the autonomy of affect as its participation in the virtual, in it openness.
In the Civilizing Process, Norbert Elias describes a historical process of restraint and moderation of affect that took place with the rise of court society. This new formation is apparent in the transformations of table manners and the new thresholds of shame and embarassment, in the "invisible wall of affects" which arises between one human body and another. According to Elias, the "civilizing process" creates new distances between adults and children and requires that children rapidly attain the advanced level of shame and revulsion that has occurred in the West over many centuries. Impulses that were once uncensored, such as "holding out the stinking thing for the other to smell" have disappeared from the waking consciousness of adults under the pressure of conditioning. Only psychoanalysis uncovers these unsatifiable desires, or "infantile" residues, in the form of unconsious, or dream content. For Elias, the superego is the psychological correlate of thse transformations of society.
For Freud, the dream work often separates affect from manifest content. This separation was for Freud one of the defining features of repression. The analysis of dreams can reveal how virtually every dream expresses certain infantile wishes and the conflicts precipitated by them. However, the screening of affect can work in both directions. Not only can infantile wishes be forbidden, but contemporary ones can be screened as well, especially those which arise in a transference relationship.
Freud's theories of Neuro-Psychoses (1894) proposed a general theory of neuroses by classifying them according to three defense mechanisms:
transformation of affect in conversion hysteria, (in which psychological problems induce medical
symptoms)
displacement of affect in obsessions,
exchange of affect in anxiety neuroses and melancholia.
In his studies of hysteria, Freud explored the relationship between affect and memory, especially instances when a memory excites an affect that it had not excited as an experience. He describe episodes that only became traumatic after the event. For example, in the Project, he describes a young girl (Emma Eckstein?) who....
For theories of Ahnlehnung "anaclitic" or cathexis--the way affect is "propped up" by objects -- see sexuality
Frederic Jameson refers to the "waning of affect" in postmodern culture.
Jean Baudrillard proposes to document it.
Does it also lead to a reduced desire for truth?