The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect (Part 1)

7/27/2019 The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect (Part 1)

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Part I of IV:

The Work of Emotion:

Ballard and the Death of AffectBy Matt Smith

Introduction

I believe in the death of the emotions and the triumph of the imagination - J.G Ballard [1]

Emotion. What do we understand of this term? An initial response would be one that reflectedon raw passion, a force that drives us to act, and to act with commitment, something we are

taken by as if by an outside influence: it is a fundamental active engagement between self andworld; our emotions are a matter of what they do. This would suggest a force that is transient,dynamic in its construction, but lasting a certain length of time and then dissipating. Yet emotionhas far deeper roots than that; its dynamism comes from the fact that it speaks from the verycore of who we are, both as a species and as individuals. Emotion has narrative content and assuch is very much of the moment yet carries forward past knowledge and also transcends thepresent, orienting us to the future; it has an embedded history, and can wax and wanethroughout a lifetime; and it is intimately bound up with our imaginative faculties. In short it is anessential element in what it means to be human. What might it mean for this to have died?What, in late twentieth century and early twenty first century life might have caused this death,and how could we measure it, understand it, and combat it? In short, what are we to do?

There is a two-part schema embedded in the title of this piece that outlines the movements it

intends to make; and a third on which the piece will ultimately focus. Essentially I am concernedwith the position of, and understanding of emotion in the late twentieth and early twenty firstcentury, on both an individual level and in a broader sense, a societal level. If we bring these

schema to a ground zero, or a point of singularity the following questions present themselves: exactly what do we mean when we talk about emotion, what is our individual and collectiveunderstanding of this elusive and complex term; and what, if anything, is inherent, andhistorically original in this particular period that might lead us to study emotion at all, to bring intofocus the emotional lives of a society and its individuals? Fundamentally, why consider thisphenomenon at all?

The third element in the title of this piece is what drives the enquiry, and gives it its substance.For Ballard, one of this particular epochs main characteristics is a certain deadening of emotiveproduction and response, something he rather apocalyptically calls the Death of Affect. In an

introduction specifically written in 1974 for the French edition ofCrash, J.G. Ballard wrote, themarriage of reason and nightmare which has dominated the 20th century has given birth to anever more ambiguous world... Over our lives preside the great twin leitmotifs of the 20thcentury- sex and paranoia... Voyeurism, self-disgust, the infantile basis of our dreams andlongings- these diseases of the psyche have now culminated in the most terrifying casualty of

the century: the death of affect. [2] What this invocation outlines is an attempt to comprehend thepsychic aetiology of a particular epoch, one characterized by a fundamental tonal shift in thecategory of the emotions: namely that this age is dominated by a mutation in emotionalsensibility toward a certain dampening of affective response, or a shattering of subjectivity that


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eventuates a death of affectivity. If we are to understand that emotion is at once a production ofindividuals and to a certain extent mediated by the possibilities of the world which the individualinhabits, then something has altered to modify the qualityof the emotion available to theindividual. The ultimate response to this must, again, be: why? What is it that Ballard sees asaltered in the make-up of our emotional lives, and what has caused it? And following on fromthis, what is he seeking to do in his work that at once highlights this decline, and yet also seeks

to point towards a resolution

of it, or a mode of transcendence of this affective decline? It would be beneficial here to look ata paradigmatic example of Ballards work, to bring into focus these questions and to illuminateprecisely the areas in which we might begin to look for and comprehend this decaying affect andsee how it is figured in the work itself.

A frag me nt fro m his no ve l The Atrocity Exhibition , title dA Krafft-Ebbing of Geometry andPosture is suitably paradigmatic in this sense in that it brings together several of his obsessionsand thus several areas of investigation from which this piece can then move outwards in aresonant exploration:

He remembered these pleasures: the conjunction of her exposed pubis with the polished

contours of the bidet; the white cube of the bathroom quantifying her left breast as she bent overthe handbasin; the mysterious eroticism of the multi-storey car park, a Krafft-Ebbing of geometryand posture...Looking at her from the bed, he recreated these situations, conceptualizations ofexquisite games [3]

The fragment is dominated by the overall detached emotionless clinicality of the prose, a kind ofscientized blankness as if all emotion has been squeezed out, or has ceased to exist alltogether. The possible evidence for this we can see in the subject matter of the fragment inwhich there is a coalescing of themes. The gaze here is directed towards a women washingherself in a bidet, and yet there is no sense of communion here (despite the word pleasures),instead the communion is between the body of the woman and the cold porcelain of the roomsfurniture. This is exaggerated in the next sentence in which the white cube of the bathroomquantifies the womans body, encroaches upon it, dominates it and seems to merge with it. Thecrisis here is one centered on the problem of orientation or spatial dynamics and differentiation,so that the gaze isnt able to focus on the differences between body and surroundings.Concomitant to this is a problem of intentionality. As we shall see later, a primary facet ofemotional life is to do with the interface between the mind and the lifeworld, with emotionsgenerated and directed outward toward an object: in this scenario, the object-world is confused,and as such the emotion, if generated at all, flounders and withers. The mysterious eroticism ofthe multi-storey car park is an extension of the disorientation, except in this example there issomething altered in the landscape that is causing a disruption in the regular affective responsepatterns; thus it is not the female form that provides erotic intensity but the contours and anglesof the concrete monolith of the parking complex. This would suggest that a shift in environment

has caused a tonal transformation in the area of emotive response. The final sentence brings

forth the notion of the game, and as such this would suggest a schism in the realm of reality, asif the gaze cannot tell the difference between real and unreal, fact and fiction, media andactuality. What this fragment provides then are three threads which can be traced throughBallards work to ascertain what has caused, and makes up and sustains this emotionaldeadening; and to what extent this proposed Death of Affect is extant at all or how it might betranscended. There is something in the cold surgical precision of Ballards prose that is at oncedescriptive of, and symptomatic of, an affectless desert realm, and yet strangely transcendent ofit, that is fascinated by the possibilities created by this new world order and yet disgusted by it


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and longing to progress beyond it. What this piece intends then, is an exploration of thisoscillating position and its various modes of representation.

It seems that by necessity if we are to understand this Death of Affect at all, and its prominentposition in characterizing this age, then we must come to grips with three things: the nebulousrealm of what emotion actually is- as Jack Katz has said, our emotions are dialectical in nature,

something we artfully produce and yet experience as forces that take over us independent ofour will [4] - there is at once a sense that emotions are the deepest expressions of our selves,and yet are thrust upon us, not something we knowingly create- how to understand thisparadox? Thus we need to comprehend its phenomenology and all the contingent factors thatgo into its makeup, production and reception; how it is possible to think of this corrosion on atonce an individual level and in a wider, more societal level- an exploration of the notion that welive inside emotional structures; and again what exactly is specific to this epoch that has causedand is caused by an emotional disruption. On the surface, the fall out of this tonal transformationwould seem something catastrophic: as a species that recognises the significance of ouremotional lives, this deadening must entail a fundamental schism in the very makeup of ourunderstanding of the human psyche, and in the categories of epistemology and ontology- theways in which we know and interrelate with the world around us.

To facilitate this movement then, the general form of this piece will be as follows: a stabilising ofa theory of affect, and more widely, emotion, so that it is clear what exactly is underpinning thissymptomatic decline in feeling, and how it can be described. To do this I will look closely atRichard Wollheims On the Emotions. I would then like to examine Frederic Jamesons claims ofa waning of affect at the heart of his influential essay on Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logicof late Capitalism. I acknowledge that this piece might be considered outdated, yet I feel it isvaluable in bringing together many of the themes that I intend to explore in the study of Ballardswork and as such is a valuable document in how it delineates a particular ages psychical andemotional organization. I also want to examine how this was influenced by Raymond Williamsnotion of a structure of feeling. This concept which posits an idea that it is possible to pick upon an emotional timbre that is a collective and societal production is central to this piece and willclarify the concept of taking the temperature of an age, and in particular open up the possibilityof a deeper discussion of the particular characteristics of this age and how this has caused/contributed to the waning or death of affect. This will provide a superstructure with which it willbe possible to examine four novels of J.G. Ballard: The Atrocity Exhibition, Crash, ConcreteIslandand High Rise. With recourse to these novels and several of his seminal short stories Iwant to examine the notion of a Death of Affect, chart its contours and movements, and move

towardsa conclusion that sees the possibility of rethinking this prematurely announced deathand is far more optimistic about the praxis of our emotional output.

[1] From a piece entitled What I Believe printed in Vale and A. Juno eds., Re/Search 8/9 J.G.Ballard1984 pp. 140-142

[2] J.G. Ballard, introduction to the French Edition ofCrash reprinted in Vale and A Juno eds.,Re/Search 8/9 op. cit., p. 96

[3] J.G. Ballard, The Atrocity Exhibition (London: Flamingo 2001) p. 94. Further references tothiswill appear parenthetically in the text asAE.[4] Jack Katz, How Emotions Work(London: Chicago U.P. 1999) p. 7


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Chapter 1: The Emotional Condition

The first and largest problem when confronting the corpus of work relating to emotion is theproblem of definition. What exactly is emotion? How do we talk about it and conceptualize it?There is a strong sense that language fails us in this area, as if emotion is somehow indefinable,or even pre-linguistic. Peter Middleton has signalled this silent realm as the lost language of

emotion [1] and Richard Wollheim in his monumental study of the emotions said, in much thesame vein that if we do appeal to the language of emotions, what do we find...[that] language is

silent on the matter. [2] My intention is to provide a solid theoretical foundation here, one, tostabilise this untrammelled and nebulous area of study and two, to provide a footing from whichto examine in more detail the Ballardian aspect of this. To this end I want to look closely at a textthat brings together the various areas of concern that are dominant in emotion theory at thepresent time, namely, the aforementioned On the Emotions by Richard Wollheim; a powerfulbook that lucidly explores the ways in which we can understand our emotional constitution. As abrief preamble to this I want to look at the historical etymology of the terms in question.

A glance at the etymology of the three main terms we are concerned with in this pieceimmediately reveals the problems of the terrain in that the language used to describe the

various states are reflective and circular and never seem to get to the nub of what they areattempting to describe:

Affect [L affectus n. of completed action]1. Mental or physical disposition or constitution 2. Psychol.An emotion, a mood

Emotion [Fr. motion, f. mouvoirexcite, move the feelings of (aftermouvoir, motion), ult. F. Lemovere]3. Agitation of mind; strong mental feeling4. Any of the natural instinctive affections of the mind (e.g. love, pity, horror) which come and goaccording to ones personality, experiences and bodily state; a mental feeling. Also, mentalfeeling as distinguished from knowledge and from will

Passion [Chr. L.passio suffering, affection]I 1. The suffering of pain; the suffering of Jesus ChristII 2. The being passive. a. the being affected from withoutIII An affection of the mind1. Any vehement, commanding, or overpowering emotion; in psychology or art, any mode inwhich the mind is affected or acted upon, as ambition, avarice, desire, hope, fear, love, hatred,

joy, grief, anger, revenge. b. Commanding, vehement, or overpowering feeling or emotion

What is obvious is that the three are intimately entwined and reflective of one another, andseem to all intents and purposes, interchangeable, dependent largely on factors such as thehistoricalperiod studied and the vagaries of fashion. What is also apparent from thesedictionary definitions is the similarity in the sense that all there seem to be something that iseither from without, or at the very least a dynamic force that arrives, or occurs to the recipient,

that seems to take possession of whomever is feeling the feeling so to speak. Thus: affectstems from a sense of action; emotion is characterized by movement and agitation; andpassion, ultimately from the passive suffering of Christ, is typified by a notion of being affectedfrom without, and of being overwhelmed by a particular feeling or emotion. Any tentative movetoward a definition then must take into account this elemental sense of a dynamic and disruptiveforce that seems to reside at once in the very strata of the subject and yet simultaneouslyoutside the subject, or at the very least outside of the usual concept of controlling faculties of thesubject; and that can be roused and called forth by external stimuli. Raymond Williamssdelineation of the etymological history of the term sensibility is also instructive here in that this


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too is characterized by a reactive appraisal of outside stimulants but there is introduced here anidea of a kind of emotional training or an education of the senses the correct responses andformulations to these sensory stimuli. [3] Historically, this word pertained literally to the senses,or that which is perceived by the senses. The significant development in sense was theextension from a process to a particular kind of product: sense as good sense, good judgement,from which the dominant modern meaning ofsensible was to be derived (Keywords p. 280 bold

type in original). Sensibility came to mean a kind of social training or social quality, where onecould correctly perform, or correctly respond to things. This became part of an importantformation which included TASTE, DISCRIMINATION, and CRITICISM, CULTURE (Keywords p.281, capitalization in original). This conception of an emotional training, in which the rawmaterial of emotion is acknowledged but subsumed within a regime of a moral life, is alsoexplored by Roger Scruton. For him the emotions are something that can be cognised andtrained- brought within the domain of reason. Buried within this idea of emotional training is astrain of though that again conforms to the model of emotion as a disruptive, inchoate force, andthus the training is a method of managing this dynamism, bringing it under the aegis of areasonable and moral code. Just as there is a knowing what to do there is a knowing what to

feel. The feelings, like the will, are capable of education. [4] Scruton seizes on the idea of acommon culture which acts as a sort of mediation between the subject and the world, a way ofmaking behaviour and emotion understandable and trainable. Scruton uses the specificexample of the funeral where the privacy of grief, the tortured awful leisure[5] of its time ismade public and the alien strength of the feelings is diffused somewhat, made cognizableand coherent. The common ritual allows for the discharging of the private madness: order andsatisfaction, where there may have been chaos and dread.[6] Yet it is what that goes into themakeup of this chaos and dread that is fundamental here- the notion of moral and emotionaleducation is secondary to what is constitutive of and elementary to, the emotional states in thefirst place. To explore this, and to see how it might be possible to come to terms with whatlanguage in the face of, remains silent, I wish to return to Wollheims On the Emotions.

Richard Wollheims On the Emotions

The text begins with a naked question: What are the emotions?And in answer Wollheim states

that an emotion is a kind of mental phenomenon, and, in arriving at a just view of any mentalphenomenon...we can best begin by plotting it on an appropriately scaled map of the humanmind (OE p. 1). To facilitate this Wollheim makes a division on this purported map of the mindbetween mental states and mental dispositions. In this division, mental states are transientevents which make up the lived part of the life of the mind (OE p. 1), such as perceptions ofcolour and sound, sensations such as pain and hunger, music heard in the mind, dreams anddaydreams and thoughts- both those that we think and those that come forth unbidden. Mentaldispositions are more fundamental, or occur in deeper strata of the mind, over which mentalstates hover and move. These dispositions have a history, of varying lengths, that can start upat birth andterminate before death- they also have the facility to wax and wane. Wollheim liststhe following as examples of dispositions: beliefs and desires; knowledge; memories; abilities;habits; obsessions and phobias; and virtues and vices (OE p. 2). There is interaction betweenthese two, and they both posses the fact of psychological reality. Wollheim firmly places the

emotions in the more profound and elemental state of the mental dispositions, and they arecaused and provoked by mental states, and can be extinguished by them also. The necessarypoint to make here is that of course emotions are easily confused as mental states, as opposedto provoked or caused by mental states, so that my anger at being cut up by a another motoristis easily assumed to be a mental state as opposed to a more basic mental disposition that has agreater narrative content both in terms of history and future. Wollheim uses verb clauses to getaround this impasse by stating that the part of the emotion felt in a mental state is generally

qualified as to feel, which signifies a far more transient state [7], whereas that belonging to a themental disposition is closer to the verb to be (OE p. 9).[8] Once Wollheim has constructed this


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map of the mind he moves onto ascertain the role of dispositions in general and the role ofemotion within this. He sees beliefs as a way of mapping the world, of providing the creaturewith apicture of the world it inhabits; this is obviously constrained by the material factors of theworld itself. Desire, for Wollheim exists to provide this creature with something at which to aim,a reason for doing- and not just anything, but this rather than that...under the cause of desire,the creature has reason- reason and cause- to bestir itself. Emotion adds to this by providing an

orientation, or an attitude to the world (OE pp. 13-15), as it were, by riding on the back of desireand providing a certain kind of colouring (Wollheim, at a later stage reflects on the fact of thegenerated emotion as a permeant affecting the attitude and mood of the one emoting (OE p.75)).[9] In this account, emotions form (what Wollheim calls The Originating Condition) inconjunction with the psychological reality of the condition and the world, thus, around theinterface of desire and belief, so that situations of frustration and satisfaction are dominant- andWollheim is at pains to point out that this can be situations in which the satisfaction or frustrationis actual and anticipated, so highlighting the important role of imagination in this process. Hisemphasis here is on the iterability and extroversion of events, the history of emotion formation,so that emotions are very rarely concerned with the actuality of events, rather about the way inwhich the original precipitant factor (what can now be called the object (OE p.77)) is re-imagined.[10] It seems to me that the crucial point here must be about the interrelationships ofpsychic events and the life-world, so that desires, beliefs and emotions are actual events (or

precipitants) with their own psychological reality that are triggered and given dynamic force, yetare also characterized by their interface with the world of phenomenological events- what iscalled intentionality. So that desires, beliefs and emotions that occur within the mind are directedoutward toward objects in the life world.[11] It is this relationship that is significant in anyexploration of ways in which emotional behaviour has metamorphosed: what has altered in theessential connection that might account for an alteration in emotional conduct?

Another vital thread in Wollheims account of the history of an emotion is that of the movementfrom passivity to activity. His claim is that emotion finds us passive and leaves us active - andyet he points out that this movement isnt to be seen as some kind of knowing self-generateddynamism, but rather that it is something received: the formation of an emotion is not an actionof ours, or...something that we do or even...that we can inhibit it, should we want to...or thatonce an emotion of ours is formed, it is under control (OE p. 81). This denial of a motivationalforce for emotion does seem inherently contradictory in a way- that something that provides ameans of activation can be at the same time, non-motivational; Wollheim places thismotivational force only within the field of desire. His resolution of this paradox is to state thatemotion is a way of expressing our deep connection with the world, so that an unemotionalresponse to a situation is wayward and undirected- we are hostages to the moment; anemotional response however comes from the very core of our beings in that it rises directly outof us...our response now derives from how we are, and from how we perceive the world, andultimately from the history we have led (OE p. 82). There is here a reiteration of thefundamental connectedness between a personalized emotional response and the life-world, andit is a site that is particularly resonant in relation to a change in affective response- if there is atonal shift in emotion and emotional response then it is something deep-buried and speaks of afundamental shift in the relationship between self and world. And it is this primary relationship

that Wollheim turns to next in that he seeks to ascertain how we manage to transform the world,so to speak, with our emotional behaviour, to accommodate the pleasure or frustration of desire.For Wollheim this reaction to pleasure or frustration is characterized by an intolerance and thusthere comes a feeling of anxiety which is assimilated in a defensive mode and the situation isperceived afresh, an attitude appropriate to this fresh perception arises and an emotion thatcould never have been anticipated on the basis of the originating condition now forms, or, wemight say malforms (OE p. 82).[12] Essentially, this mechanism of defence initiates a situationin which the world undergoes a kind of transformation[13] and Wollheim, finding this slightlyinaccurate and hyperbolic and painting in broadly Freudian strokes, calls this a phantasy. At


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the core of this is the reoccurring notion of the interaction between mind and world,psychological realities and the life-world, and the ways in which emotion and emotionalbehaviour is prominent in our understanding of our position in the world and how we orientourselves to it. It is here that the enervated or moribund cadaver of affect is best sought out,where it can best be examined and navigated, where it can be sized up and assessed andcomprehended. Wollheims systematic delineation of the form, content and whyof emotion

details a framework from which it is possible to work with emotion is and how it might be figuredas dying away. As we have already seen in the brief exposition of a fragment of Ballardian prosefrom The Atrocity Exhibition it is in precisely this area that we are charting the contours ofaffective disruption, and that this disruption is specifically figured as a breakdown between thepsychic realities of the protagonists mental states and dispositions and the lifeworld which theyinhabit. It is in this disorienting realm that emotional praxis has come unmoored: person toperson, and person to environment. If this is fairly clearly mapped out in our exploration ofBallards work, what I think is necessary to add to this is a more historicised and specificparadigm, something which is missing from Wollheims account. What this will allow for is thistheoretical framework to be extended and facilitate a more thorough examination as to why thisparticular age is characterized by a wasting away of affect. If we have conceptualised thepossibility of a breakdown of affective response on a personal, individualised level, then what ofparticular societal structures? What I wish to introduce is a concept of emotional structures that

are at once concerned with individuals and transcendent of them. To facilitate this I intend tolook closely at Raymond Williams notion of a structure of feeling- structures that can be said toencompass societal groups and broadly speaking, give the temperature of an age.

Raymond Williams and the Structure of Feeling

In The Long Revolution Williams continues his project to chart the revision of thoughts andfeelings to changes in society since the late eighteenth century. For Williams (this of course wasWestern- centric, even Anglo-centric) this long revolution has entered a definably new stage inthat could now be characterised by a shift in the industrial and political processes and in the waywe were under the aegis of a new and dominant communications network- all of which wasprofoundly influencing day to day living. Williamss primary concern was how to record these

changes or how to get a grasp on the massiveness of these new presences. As he said, thescale of the whole process- the struggle for democracy, the development of industry, theextension of communications, and the deep social and personal changes- is indeed too large toknow or even imagine,[14] yet what Williams sought to do, to at least attempt to examine theways in which these new phenomena affected the way people reacted to both each other andthe world around them, was to observe the ways in which people reacted aesthetically. Hisanalysis of culture was based around three nodes: the first was concerned with the notion of anideal culture in which onecould look at culture as a state or process of human perfection, interms of certain or absolute human values, and one could find in lives and works a reference toa kind of timeless order, a permanent reference to the human condition. His second theorycentred around culture as a kind of documentary in which culture is figured as the body ofintellectual and imaginative work in which human thought and experience are variouslyrecorded. The third of these was culture as a method of social commentary, a description of a

certain way of life- this could be considered in individual works of art and also in institutionsranging from the family to industrial production. What could be achieved from the study ofculture utilising these methods was a sense of lived experience of how people lived in theworld. He acknowledged the difficulties of achieving such an aim, saying the most difficult thingto get hold of, in studying any past period, is this felt sense of the quality of life at a particularplace and time (LR p. 47); one could achieve a kind of pattern of culture, but this was always anabstract thing; the most affective method of carrying out these observations then, to penetratethis abstract realm, was to look at the art of the time.


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What this analysis might allow then is a glimpse at what Williams called a structure offeeling.[15] This was as firm and definite as structure suggests yet it operates in the mostdelicate and least tangible parts of our activity.[16] In one sense this structure of feeling is theculture of the period:it is the particular living result of all the elements in the generalorganization (LR p. 48). The location of this structure was abstracted, in the sense thatindividuals didnt possess it as such, but it was possessed by the community as a whole, but

not in any formal sense, learned (LR p. 49). This intangibility leaves the structure of feeling asa kind of ghostly, spectral presence, everywhere and nowhere all at once, informing all aspectsof a communitys lives and yet invisible. The peculiar location of a structure of feeling is theendless comparison that must occur in the process of consciousness between the articulatedand the lived...[the zone is comprised of] whats not fully articulated, all that comes through asdisturbance, tension, blockage, emotional trouble.[17] So it is from cultural emanations of thestructure of feeling that one is able to get a measure of the time, where one is able to samplethe disturbances and blockages and emotional trouble that characterise a particular epoch. Wecan think of certain cultural artefacts and art forms as radiating from this primal ooze,delineating its inarticulable parameters and attempting to unblock the information that is trying toget through. I would like to move on from here and examine in detail some of Ballards works toascertain to what extent we can use these them as examples of both emanations of thisstructure of feeling and as force fields against it, a shoring up of the psyche against the

diseased secretions that flood out from it, and ultimately attempt to transcend them.

Frederic Jameson and the Waning of Affect

I am cautious of turning this piece into a yet another jeremiad against Jamesons notion of thepostmodern. So, whilst I am aware that Jamesons notion of a waning of affect is a central tenetof his critique of late capitalism and part of the cluster of transformations that are at the heart ofthis move into a new mutation of the life-world, my central concern is not with the pros and consof postmodernity and its possible (in)validity as such. Instead my concern lies with the way inwhich Jameson charts this movement, and how the waning of affect is figured within it.

Jamesons navigation of the contours of postmodernism, of which the waning of affect is a

central principle, is very much concerned with understanding what Raymond Williams called thelived quality of an age; indeed Jameson goes as far to say that this is what characterizespostmodernism proper, a theorizing its own condition of possibility (PM p. ix). So, in a sensethe definition is somewhat like chasing ones own tail in that in trying to theorize the present orunderstand it as it occurs and charting its transformations, is an impossibility. Thus, thepostmodern looks for breaks for events rather than new worlds...for the when-it-all-changed ...for shifts and irrevocable changes in the representation of things and of the waythey change (PM p. ix). We can map Williams own zone or location of culture on to thisexploration and examine how postmodernism tries to get to grips with a cultural zone that hasexpanded to a massive extent and has become a zone of commodification (that includesaesthetic production), such that the tensions and gaps propounded by Williams are everharder to detect orfeel. Jameson notes that this causes a displacement of reaction or emotionalresponse, a prodigious exhilaration with the new order of things, a commodity rush; our

representations of things tending to arouse an enthusiasm and a mood swing not necessarilyinspired by the things themselves (PM p. x). There is a quirk in emotional response so thattypical affective reactions are disordered, or maladjusted in some way. This new emotionalground tone then is exemplified by a deadening of emotive response, or a waning of affect (PMp. 10). Jameson uses the example of Munchs The Scream to highlight the high modernistconcerns with alienation and the bourgeois monad and its cathartic cry from wells of emotionaldepth, a cry for help in its isolation: emotion is then projected out and externalized, as gestureor cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling (PM p. 12).In the altered life- world of the postmodern these psychopathologies are no longer apparent;


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instead the former subject which feels alinetaion and anomie is fragmented and shattered andwhere the was once a subject and a coherent self, there is no longer a self present to do thefeeling (PM p. 15). There is no longer a centralized subject to create the usual feedback loop ofemotional reception and response thus the emotional ground tone is subtly altered and theemotional content, as such, doesnt disappear and die off completely, but instead reappears asa kind of residue, or in uncontrollable intensities: this is not to say that the cultural products of

the postmodern era are utterly devoid of feeling, but rather that such feelings...are now freefloating and impersonal and tend to be dominated by a peculiar kind of euphoria (PM p. 16).This abstracted mode of looking at a wayward emotional response and reception system isparticular hard to visualize in any consistent fashion. Indeed, one doesnt quite know where tolookfor these inarticulate and depersonalized emotions. One feels that we have to return toWilliams notion of a structure of feeling in which one doesnt necessarily visualize or locate thisstructure as much as own it on a depersonalized, community based level. This is supported byJamesons claim that we cannot begin to understand this new mode of affective disorder withrecourse to older thematics: the waning of affect however might also have been characterizedin the narrower context of literary criticism, as the waning of the great high modernist thematicsof time and temporality, the elegiac mysteries ofduree and memory...or psychic experience, ourcultural languages, are today dominated by categories of space rather than by categories oftime (PM p. 16). The ground shift is such that there is a flattening out and a shift towards a

spatialization of our mode of perception; and we flounder in this space, are unable to find ourway around in it, and as such, have lost our bearings, our methods of navigation. Thisannexation of ever-greater expanses (including the vast corridors of time) has for Jamesonrequired a reformulation of the concept of the sublime. As the way we react to the newdimensions of a spatialized life world, and try to absorb and encompass its magnitude thusthere is a new experience of awe and fear, of sublimity. Try as one might, it is hard not to figurethis new kind of sublimity, at least partly, as a kind of return of the repressed, the displaced anddeviated emotional intensities reappearing elsewhere. This re-jigged sublimity then, at leastoffers some hope of affect activity, if it can be harnessed or at the very least understood in someway. And if this formulation is to bear fruit in any way then the way best to approach it is to try tocomprehend what is causing this sublimity and find new ways to represent and codify it, or tounderstand it as a mode ofreawakeningaffect, or at the very least of redirecting it in some way.

How, if it all does this reading of Jamesons understanding of affect disturbance feed into whatwe have learned from Wollheims more in-depth study of the emotions and how are we tousefully combine the two modes of critique? While somewhat lacking in rigour, what I think itprovides in its oblique and slightly under-supported way, is a useful synthesis of a theoreticalawareness of individual emotional structures and at the same time a broader conception of ashared emotional structure that we can be said to inhabit, or that can be said to be characteristicof an age- and it is because of this that I have included it here as a segue way into a reading ofBallard concentrates on specifically this dual understanding of emotion. So it is at this stage thatI would like to move into the second chapter of the piece and attempt a reading of selectedworks of J.G. Ballard to see how we might view this death of affect, check its progress andexamine its decaying contours. In performing this reading of Ballards works I will plot theaetiology of this declining of affect and illustrate the symptomology and assess its validity as a

concept and its worth as a measure of an age. To begin I intend a brief reading of Ballards shortintroduction to Crash. Firstly as a prolegomenon to a wider reading of his work, but also to see ifthere is a way to read this text as prefiguring Jameson in some way, in highlighting the samethemes and in pointing towards a mode of transcendence or a light at the end of the tunnel thatmight allow for these called-for new modes and figurations to appear.


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[1] This is the title of a chapter in Peter Middletons The Inward Gaze (London: Routledge 1992).This implies an almost Heideggerian sense of a rejuvenation of language or a return to a goldenage which I am not sure I agree with, but it does point out the very real difficulties of penetratingthe silent realm of true definition.

[2] Richard Wollheim, On the Emotions (London: Yale U.P. 1999) p. xii. Further references will

appear parenthetically in the text as OE

[3] Christopher Bollas points out that in psychoanalytic parlance, sensibility refers to anindividuals unconscious capacity to receive the object world, which results in a more sensitivecontact with the other and a greater reliance on feelings than on cognition which to meresonates strongly with a notion of healthy emotional life, and ways in which it might be possibleto come to terms with a reawakening of affect. Cracking Up: The Work of UnconsciousExperience (London: Routledge 1995) pp. 14-15

[4] Roger Scruton, Emotion and Culture in The Aesthetic Understanding(Manchester:Carcanet 1983) p. 141

[5] This is a phrase of Emily Dickinsons that Scruton utilizes

[6] ibid. p. 152

[7] This distinction is also explored by Peter Goldie in The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration(Oxford: Clarendon 2000) except he emphasises the entwined nature and narrative content ofemotional states as dynamically present in mental states, so that, for example, jealousy isinformed by more than just an external stimuli and has a longer narrative past that may extendback years, and thus is part of the disposition also.

[8] To the possibility of confusion here, that one cannot understand anger in this sense unlessone feels angry, Wollheim invokes the example of an underlying fear of snakes which can beadequately described without there actually being a snake present, so that to feel is not thewhole content of the emotion but that it is also formed by the possibility of to be.

[9] Whilst following Wollheims formulations closely I am intending to depart from him in so muchas I tend to see emotions as working far harder than Wollheim allows for and playing afundamental part in our general praxis and interaction with the world around us, both physicaland social. It is in this general praxis that I see a way of contending or working against thenotion of an enervation of affect.

[10] This is echoed in Goldie, where he states that perception is very close to imagination op.cit. p. 20

[11] The exception that proves the rule here seems to be shame which doesnt necessarily havean object as such, but is directed toward the self. Sartre said of shame that it is by nature

recognition. I recognise that I am as the Other sees me (cited in Katz op. cit. p. 151). This isalso explored in, for instance, June Price Tangney and Rowland S. Miller, Are Shame Guilt andEmbarrassment DistinctEmotions? Journal of Personality and Social PsychologyVol.70 No.61996

[12] Wollheim expands on this notion of a malformation calling it an oblique or inappositeresponse to the circumstance in which the person is, or believes himself to be p. 87

[13] Wollheim is working with and against Sartre in this section and acknowledges his work upto a point but finds it too overtly metaphysical and not working in the paradigm of psychological


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phenomenology. See Jean-Paul Sartre,A Sketch for a Theory of the Emotions (London:Methuen 1962)

[14] Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (London: Hogarth 1992) p. xii. Further referenceswill appear parenthetically in the text as LR

[15] I think Williams vocabulary is the most precise at describing the attempt at understandingthe feeling of an age. I also think David Harveys cultural aesthetic is a perceptive andaccurate attempt at this most problematic of descriptions. See Harvey, The Condition ofPostmodernity(Oxford: Blackwell 1989)

[16] In Keywords Williams charts the etymology of the term structure and notes that in itsvarious manifestations in the English language, its second meaning came to be towards themanner ofconstruction, not only in buildings but in extended and figurative applications...themutual relation of constituent parts or elements of a whole as defining of its particularnature (London: Fontana 1988) p. 301 Further references will appear parenthetically in the text

[17] Raymond Williams, Politics and Letters Vol. 1 (London: NLB 1979) pp. 167-8

The Work of Emotion: Ballard and the Death of Affect (Part 1)

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