Conscience and emotion

Posted on March 29, 2012 by

Paul Strohm was the speaker at our regular lunchtime seminar today and generously agreed to write up a version of his talk as a blog post too, ranging from St Augustine to Albert Camus, via Calvin, Dostoyevsky and Freud.

Paul is Visiting Leverhulme Professor of History and English at Queen Mary, University of London, where he delivered a series of lectures in January and February 2012 on ‘Premodern Interiorities’. His topic today was the relationship between conscience and emotion, and his thoughts were drawn in part from his Conscience: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, 2011).

I don’t think of conscience as an emotion per se, but as working in close tandem with emotion, as needing emotion for the accomplishment of its aims.

Consider, in this respect, the moment when Augustine, on the brink of conversion but still hesitant, is chided by his angry conscience:

The day came when I was naked to myself and my conscience angrily spoke out within me [increparet in me conscientia mea]: ‘where is my tongue?  Indeed, you have said that you would not cast off the burden of vanity for an uncertain truth.  Yet others have not exhausted themselves in such a quest, or spent ten years or more thinking about it.’  Thus I was inwardly gnawed [rodebar intus] and violently confused with horrible shame [pudor].

This is an early stirring of conscience—in that it must begin by finding its tongue, its ‘voice.’  And notice that, even in its earliest appearance, his conscience is already irascible [‘angrily spoke out’] and sarcastic besides [‘yet others . . .’].  Its purpose is to unsettle; in this case, to ‘gnaw.’   So conscience is full of attitude . . . but I wouldn’t exactly say that it is an emotion.  It knows just what it is doing—has a rational purpose, if you will—and that purpose is to stir an emotion (and, by stirring emotion, to provoke an action in the form of a new choice.)

What Augustine feels as a result of conscience’s prodding—the emotion governing his self-recrimination–is pudor.  Pudor here stands at a late Classical/Early Christian crossroads.  In its late Classical sense it means ‘shame’, a public emotion, an emotion one feels when ones actions do not measure up to a widely shared norm of good conduct.  In its early Christian sense it means ‘guilt,’ a more inward or self-generated (or at least personally embraced) sense of personal wrongdoing.

I want to stay with this idea of conscience as reliant upon, as productive of, the emotions of shame and guilt.    These are ‘situated’ emotions, each with its own developmental history.  Bernard Williams first made the point I have already alluded to, that shame is most likely to be associated with Greek and classical culture, guilt with Hebrew and Christian culture.  And Williams goes on to say something quite suggestive, that we can take back to Augustine’s dilemma:

The most primitive experiences of shame are connected with sight and being seen, but it has been interestingly suggested that guilt is rooted in hearing, the sound in oneself of the voice of judgement.

St Augustine of Hippo as depicted by Sandro Botticelli

Here, in this passage, Conscience shames Augustine by telling him what the world knows about him, how he appears in the eyes of the world: the standard against which Augustine is measured is what other people are doing, how bad this looks for him, to have hesitated for ten years prior to conversion, that there is a community out there which would view him as a malingerer.  This humiliation by comparison with public norms is a matter of shame.  And Conscience also speaks to Augustine in the voice of moral authority, finds his tongue and uses it to upbraid his errant subject in the ‘voice of judgement,’ an irrefutable voice that Freud will later call the ‘voice of the father,’ a voice ‘quite certain of itself.’   And this is a matter of guilt.

This voice of castigation, this unappeasable voice, has sounded in the ears of believers and, eventually, non-believers alike, for some two thousand years.  And it is quite effective in holding people to an external (by the powerful goad of shame) and to an even more elusive and demanding internal mark (by the even more powerful goad of guilt).  In fact, it proves such a powerful stimulus to emotion that its biggest problem revolves around the possibility that it might outdo itself.  Here, within the evolving Christian tradition, I think of Calvin, who finds in conscience a powerful ally to self-reformation, but one that risks overbearing its subject, and even despairing in the extent of its own task.

Calvin worries about whether conscience is up to the tasks imposed upon it.  He imagines conscience at bay, shaken to the core, wholly intimidated by God’s wrath:  ‘When oure conscience beholdeth onely indignation and vengeance, how canne it butte tremble and quake for fear’?  This is a conscience that has lost, rather than gained, in self confidence and in capacity to perform its admonitory duties.   The result is a form of ‘blowback,’ in which conscience, setting out to provoke salutary guilt in its subject, ends up wracked by its own guilt, including the wholly unproductive emotion of fear: fear, like the most intense of emotions, written on the body, fear that shakes to the core, fear that causes its own subject to ‘tremble and quake.’  This conscience, prey to its own despairing emotions, fails in its primary duty, which is to inspire salutary and reformative emotions in its subject.  (Which is why, in Calvin’s system, conscience is itself now in need of reformation, by grace.)

Self punition and festering emotion resurface in the great nineteeth-century critiques of conscience   Consider the instance of Ivan Karamazov, the perfect Freudian subject before Freud.  Although he does not actually kill his father, he confesses to complicity in the crime because he has wished his father dead.  This, then, is an effect of conscience: it generates feelings/emotions of guilt, which lead him to imagine himself complicit in a crime he did not commit.  Conscience is, in this sense, gone awry; it provokes an emotion which, rather than leading to reformation, overbears fact and sense.

Calvin found conscience likely to be overborne, overcome by the very emotions of guilt and despair that it set out to instill.  Freud goes a step further.  He instates guilt not just as conscience’s consequence, but as its point of origin: an apparent effect as cause.  A key Freudian perception is that guilt, and conscience as guilt’s abettor, are much freer-floating than we realize, and stand in a different relation to the criminal act than is usually assumed.  A standard trajectory would be that you do something wrong and then (prodded by conscience) feel guilty about it.  Whereas Freud suggests guilty emotions can precede the criminal act, can be its incentive.

All these critics of conscience see it as operating improperly, as overbearing on the one hand or stalled and festering on the other.  The stalled conscience is a distinctively twentieth-century predicament, and this is a conscience in which emotion, rather than exceeding its mandate, simply fizzles out—deserts conscience and leaves it foundering.

A literary rendering of such a case would be the character Clamance, in Camus’ The Fall (La Chute, 1956).  Camus elsewhere describes him as ‘the exact illustration of a guilty conscience.’  Yet in this case his guilt lacks emotional purchase, has not roused him to action. Clamance’s conscience is constituted by a ‘cry’ uttered by a woman drowning herself in the Seine, a cry which ‘waited for me until the day I encountered it’ and to which ‘I had to submit and admit my guilt’.  This is a cry to which Clamance was initially unable to respond, and his inability to respond to it—even to know whence it has issued or what it wants from him–now debars his return to an untroubled life.   His guilt, in this case, has become something other than a spur to action; it is pervasive but nerveless and inert, less an emotion, if we think of emotion as an affective feeling, than a continuing philosophical predicament, a state of affairs.  Clamance has a conscience, to be sure; he is suffering from a predicament of conscience, an excess of it.  What he needs now is some affect, some accompanying emotion.  Even though emotion, strongly felt, can be unpredictable or erratic in its consequences, he lacks the incentive to choice and action that only emotion can provide.

 

Sexual liberation in the closet

Posted on March 28, 2012 by

Christopher Turner is the author of Adventures In the Orgasmatron: Wilhelm Reich and the Invention of Sex (long-listed for the Orwell Prize). He is speaking about Reich this evening at the London Philosophy Club. This is an extract from his book. 

When Wilhelm Reich, the most brilliant of the second generation of psychoanalysts who had been Freud’s pupils, arrived in New York in August 1939, only a few days before the outbreak of war, he was optimistic that his ideas fusing sex and politics would be better received there than they had been in fascist Europe. Despite its veneer of puritanism, America was a country already much preoccupied with sex – as Alfred Kinsey’s renowned investigations, which he had begun the year before, were to show. However, it was only after the second world war that the idea of sexual liberation would permeate the culture at large. Reich could be said to have invented this “sexual revolution”; a Marxist analyst, he coined the phrase in the 1930s in order to illustrate his belief that a true political revolution would be possible only once sexual repression was overthrown. That was the one obstacle Reich felt had scuppered the efforts of the Bolsheviks. “A sexual revolution is in progress,” he declared, “and no power on earth will stop it.”

Reich was a sexual evangelist who held that satisfactory orgasm made the difference between sickness and health. It was the panacea for all ills, he thought, including the fascism that forced him from Europe. In his 1927 study The Function of the Orgasm, he concluded that “there is only one thing wrong with neurotic patients: the lack of full and repeated sexual satisfaction” (the italics are his). Seeking to reconcile psychoanalysis and Marxism, he argued that repression – which Freud came to believe was an inherent part of the human condition – could be shed, leading to what his critics dismissed as a “genital utopia” (they mocked him as “the prophet of bigger and better orgasms”). His sexual dogmatism got him kicked out of both the psychoanalytic movement and the Communist party. Nevertheless, Reich was a figurehead of the sex-reform movement in Vienna and Berlin – before the Nazis, who deemed it part of a Jewish conspiracy to undermine European society, crushed it. His books were burned in Germany along with those of Magnus Hirschfeld and Freud. Reich fled to Denmark, Sweden and then Norway, as fascism pursued him across the continent.

Soon after he arrived in the United States – by which time his former psychoanalytic colleagues were questioning his sanity – Reich invented the Orgone Energy Accumulator, a wooden cupboard about the size of a telephone booth, lined with metal and insulated with steel wool. It was a box in which, it might be said, his ideas about sex came almost prepackaged. Reich considered his orgone accumulator an almost magical device that could improve its users’ “orgastic potency” and, by extension, their general, and above all mental, health. He claimed that it could charge up the body with the life force that circulated in the atmosphere and which he christened “orgone energy”; in concentrated form, these mysterious currents could not only help dissolve repressions but treat cancer, radiation sickness and a host of minor ailments. As he saw it, the box’s organic material absorbed orgone energy, and the metal lining stopped it from escaping, acting as a “greenhouse” and, supposedly, causing a noticeable rise in temperature in the box.

The charismatic Reich persuaded Albert Einstein to investigate the machine, whose workings seemed to contradict all known principles of physics. After two weeks of tests Einstein refuted Reich’s claims. However, the orgone box became fashionable in America in the 1940s and 50s, and Reich grew increasingly notorious as the leader of the new sexual movement that seemed to be sweeping the country. The accumulator was used by such countercultural figureheads as Norman Mailer, JD Salinger, Saul Bellow, Paul Goodman, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, Dwight Macdonald and William S Burroughs. In the 1970s Burroughs wrote an article for Oui magazine entitled “All the Accumulators I Have Owned”. In it, he boasted: “Your intrepid reporter, at age 37, achieved spontaneous orgasm, no hands, in an orgone accumulator built in an orange grove in Pharr, Texas.” At the height of his James Bond fame, Sean Connery swore by the device, and Woody Allen parodied it in Sleeper (1973), giving it the immortal nickname the “Orgasmatron”.

To bohemians, the orgone box was celebrated as a liberation machine, the wardrobe that would lead to utopia, while to conservatives it was Pandora’s box, out of which escaped the Freudian plague – the corrupting influence of anarchism and promiscuous sex. Reich’s eccentric device can be seen as a prism through which to look at the conflicts and controversies of his era, which witnessed an unprecedented politicisation of sex. When I first came across a reference to the accumulator, I was puzzled and fascinated: why on earth would a generation seek to shed its sexual repressions by climbing into a closet? And why were others so threatened by it? What does it tell us about the ironies of the sexual revolution that its symbol of liberation was a claustrophobic metal-lined box?

How can we make sense of revelatory experiences?

Posted on March 24, 2012 by

Yesterday I went to an excellent conference on revelatory experiences at the Institute of Psychiatry, which brought together neuroscientists, psychiatrists, psychologists, historians, theologians and members of the public (many of whom had revelatory experiences – turns out they’re pretty common!)

The conference tried to approach and talk about revelatory experiences from two main directions: history and neuroscience. So, first of all, we heard from two research teams – one led by Dr Quinton Deeley at KCL, the other by Professor David Oakley at UCL – who are studying the brain-imaging of hyponotised people. They’re trying to understand the phenomenon of ‘automatic writing’  – the feeling of some external being controlling one’s hand or even guiding one’s thoughts, as in the Caravaggio drawing of St Mark and the angel, on the right.

The researchers have done interesting work in finding the neural correlates of  hypnotised and dissociative states. But I think there’s a difference between being hypnotised and having a revelatory experience. People who are easy to hypnotise are typically easily suggestible and socially conditioned, while people who have revelations are (to generalise) often quite socially dysfunctional, stubborn misfits. And of course, in the UCL and KCL experiments, we know where the suggestions are coming from – from the scientists. We don’t know where the external suggestions are coming from in revelatory experiences.

We then heard a fascinating presentation by a young neuroscientist called Dr Robin Carhart-Harris, who is working with Professor David Nutt at Imperial on the well-publicised research into the neural imaging of psychedelic experience (you can watch a video of Robin presenting his work here). Robin said the imaging suggests a decrease in filtering or connecting activity in the brain when people are on psychedelics – not opening the mind, so much as closing down some parts of it so that other parts of it can be released.

And his team also noticed an unusual relationship between the default brain network (DBN) – the system we are in usually, where our consciousness free roams inside our head, day-dreaming and introspecting – and the task-positive network (TPN), which we use more occasionally to focus on external stimuli. Usually these two systems are anti-correlated. But during psychedelic experiences, they appear to become correlated, aligned and synchronised – we are both externally focused and day-dreaming, so that the outer and inner worlds become fused. The ego boundaries are dissolved. We return to a state of infant wonder, projecting the shadows of our dreams onto the cave-walls of external reality.

Robin noted that, for many participants in the Imperial study, and in another project running now at John Hopkins, the psychedelic experience in the laboratory is one of the most meaningful and spiritual experiences of their lives. In the John Hopkins study being run by Roland Griffiths, for example, 70% of participants report mystical experiences, and 60% describe it as the most spiritually meaningful experience of their lives. That’s pretty remarkable.

We then had some historical perspectives on revelatory experience. Dr Jane Shaw, Dean of Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, presented her work on the Panacea Society – a religious community that sprang up in Bedford during World War I around the figure of Mabel Bartlerop, who announced one day she was Octavia, daughter of God, and who claimed to receive dictation from God every afternoon at 5.30.

And then Dr Phil Lockley, part of the same ‘Prophecy Project’ at Oxford as Dr Shaw, gave a useful talk outlining how recent historians have tried to contextualise revelatory experiences, in works like Barbara Taylor’s Eve and the New Jerusalem (1983), Phyllis Mack’s Visionary Women (1992), Diane Watt’s Secretaries of God (1997), and (going back a bit) Norman Cohn’s  The Pursuit of the Millennium (1957).

Dr Lockley showed that historians can tell us interesting things   about how revelatory experiences are culturally constructed and influenced by their time. For example, Dr Shaw told us how the language of inspiration in the Panacea Society was inspired by the invention of the wireless – the mediums talked of ‘tuning in’ to God – a phrase which was subsequently taken up and popularised by Timothy Leary and the LSD counterculture. The movement was also part of the ferment during World War I – it was fiercely patriotic, and members of it lobbied the Archbishop of Canterbury to open the ‘sealed box of prophecies’ left by the 18th century visionary Joanna Southcott, which she said should be opened in a time of national crisis by the 24 bishops of the nation (here’s the box on the left). I personally think the opening of the box should be the climax of the Olympics inauguration ceremony.

Both these approaches – the neuroscientific and the historical – tell us some fascinating stuff about revelations. But it seems to me that both approaches leave something out. There is the important question of the quality of the revelatory experience. Academia often leaves out such qualitative questions – for example, academics are so busy contextualising a novel, say, or a therapy, they won’t ask if it’s any good, which is really the most important question. They say it’s ‘interesting’, by which they mean it is useful for their particular line of research.

There’s a value judgement we have to make about revelatory experiences – both other people’s, and our own.

I come from a Yorkshire Quaker family, and I remember my great-grandmother telling a story about a woman standing up during a Quaker meeting, moved by the Holy Spirit, and proclaiming: ‘Raspberry ripple with a cherry on top’. Well, yes, I mean, absolutely, I’m all for raspberry ripples, particularly with a cherry on top, but that’s not a revelation I will spend much time studying or following, because of my own value judgement about its quality or meaningfulness. (Although shortly afterwards, another Quaker family, the Frys, launched a chocolate called Ripple. Make of that what you will.)

I asked Dr Shaw why, if Mabel’s inspired poetry wasn’t much good in her estimation, had she spent years studying it. Did she think it was actually from God? She said she was a historian, so couldn’t answer that. But later on, she came back to the question, and said she thought Mabel did have a ‘spiritual authority’, which was apparent in her letters to her flock more than in her inspired writing. Dr Shaw made a value judgement about the quality of Mabel’s work – which involved an evaluation of Mabel’s relationship to God. That was at the foundation of her enduring interest in the Panacea Society.

So in general, can we make value judgements about revelatory experiences? I mean, besides going and asking God if he really did send this message or if we should put it in the spam folder.

Yes, I think we can.

Firstly, we can make judgements about truth-claims that prophets make. For example, Mabel of the Panacea Society claimed that members of the Society would never die. Turns out she was wrong. That, to my mind, reduces her authority and the authority of her experience. There’s that amazing scene in The Brothers Karamazov where the dead body of the inspired priest starts to decompose and smell, thereby conflicting with the spiritual tradition that the bodies of the inspired don’t decompose. Well, that undermines the spiritual authority of that charismatic tradition. It shouldn’t have made those claims.

Secondly, we can make aesthetic judgements about the quality of inspiration. Is it cliched or gibberish? Or is it beautiful, complex, coherent? Rosemary Brown, an uneducated housewife from Balham, claimed in the 1960s to be a medium in touch with the spirit of Liszt and various other composers. The BBC went to interview her and asked ‘Liszt’ to come up with a composition. And eventually s/he did – and, according to a psychiatrist who was at the conference, the piece she wrote was incredibly complex, with the left hand playing in 5/4 and the right in 3/2 – far beyond Rosemary’s technical ability to play, and the sort of thing that scholars say Liszt might have written. The aesthetic quality of the composition makes her claims to inspiration more credible, in my view. Or at least, more interesting (there’s that academic word again).

Thirdly, can the person make sense of their vision, can they articulate it, can they defend it?  Think of the young Jesus holding his own in the Temple against the elder authorities. Think of Socrates – inspired by his daemon, yet capable of rationally articulating his beliefs. I know Kierkegaard would argue that revelation is irrational, that the whole point of it is you can’t articulate it, you can’t make sense of it or defend it. Well, I think part of the challenge for someone who has a revelatory experience is to try and make sense of it and communicate it, to carry it down from the mountain. That also means you need to be able to defend its ideas, without simply saying ‘an angel told me’.

Fourthly, does it lead to human flourishing – your own, and other people’s. One of my friends is schizophrenic, and is sure the voices he hears are angelic. But the voices are very mean to him, they block his flourishing. Of course, he would say to me ‘how do you know? How can you tell the state of my soul or your soul?’ I’m not sure how to answer that question. But we can test out what the voices say and show they don’t always tell the truth, for example. In which case we grant them less authority.

And we can see if they cause us distress and suffering, or if they help us. Professor Philippa Geraty of the Institute of Psychiatry, who works with people experiencing psychotic episodes, presented some fascinating research (a lot of which was done by Dr Emanuelle Peters of KCL), which showed how common psychotic experiences are. Yet they’re not always distressing. In particular, research has shown people in new religious / evangelical communities are more likely to experience psychotic symptoms and beliefs than the general population, but less likely to see them as problematic or distressing than isolated individuals. In the words of Dr Quinton Deeley of KCL, they have constructed ‘a shared context and a shared meaning’. They have socially framed a psychotic experience in such a way as to recover from it, find meaning in it and even draw strength and joy from it. (On that subject, check out this support organisation – the spiritual crisis network.)

Both Geraty and Deeley spoke of helping people find meaning in their psychotic experiences, which apparently is central to the ‘recovery movement’ in psychosis treatment. One of the delegates told me about the work of Rufus May, a clinical psychologist in Bradford who was sectioned in the 1980s. Check out his website – it’s absolutely fascinating about how social support networks like Hearing Voices help people find meaning in psychotic experience. He writes: ‘Being given a diagnosis of schizophrenia was not helpful for me.  It created a learned hopelessness in me and my family who resigned themselves to the established belief I would always be ill, unable to work and always need antipsychotic medication.  There is a deeply held assumption that schizophrenia is a disease-like degenerative process. Thus the category of schizophrenia is associated with a failure to recover and a gradual deterioration in social functioning. It is more helpful to see each individual’s mental health as a unique and evolving story, which is importantly influenced by social and relational experiences.’

Perhaps it doesn’t matter where revelatory experiences come from, it’s what you do with them and what they lead to. What is the quality of the work you go on to do? How much does it help people? How much does it help you? It is difficult to evaluate this, in the absence of a scientific measurement device that measures godliness (a sort of spiritual Geiger counter). Yet as humans we do evaluate the quality of various revelations, and our evaluations decide what revelations we use to guide our life. I’m not into the Panacea Society, for example, while I am interested in Plato, Rumi, the Buddha and other inspired writings, because of my own qualitative evaluations about the writing and the organisations they inspired, evaluations which I am prepared to defend rationally.

Take Alcoholics Anonymous. It was inspired by a religious vision experienced by Bill W. when he was on belladonna, which he took as part of a radical psychedelic cure for alcoholism. OK, that’s interesting. But it’s more interesting what he did with it, the work he did, the movement he constructed, which I think is one of the most interesting and successful movements of the 20th century, in terms of the human suffering it reduced and the flourishing it increased. You can qualitatively evaluate the work without having to evaluate if Bill’s vision ‘really was’ from God.

The world is full of people who claim to have received messages from God. They usually think they’re uniquely blessed with this message and get very grandiose. Well, you’re not, lots of people have such experiences. Some of those messages seem useful, others less so. We need some kind of spam filter, and a way of evaluating the quality of the message without relying solely on the purported address of the sender (contact@God.org).

Roy Porter: the Musical!

Posted on March 20, 2012 by

I went to see some modern dance at Sadlers Wells last night – not my usual evening out but a friend dragged me along (and I’m glad they did: thank you friend!) It was the latest dance from a choreographer called Wayne McGregor, who is, my friend assures me, the hottest choreographer out there – he works with the Royal Ballet, the Bolshoi and, er, Thom Yorke (he choreographed Thom Yorke’s dance in the Lotus Flower video, which I assumed was some kind of seizure).

His latest show, FAR, was pretty avant-garde as Monday evenings go: men and women writhing and contorting against a bank of kinetic white lights (the lights designed by the art collective Random International) while Ben Frost’s electronic score screeches and blips. At times it felt like a Guantanamo interrogation – but it was always interesting. Every gesture, every move, was unusual and startling. There wasn’t a single physical cliche in there.

Afterwards, McGregor gave a talk, and revealed – somewhat to my surprise – that the inspiration for FAR was Roy Porter’s final work of medical and emotional history – Flesh in the Age of Reason. It made sense in retrospect – the gangly, ungainly, almost abortive figures the dancers created at the beginning of the piece, like creatures from Bedlam, occasionally stretching into grace and harmony, then shivering into curled-up Francis Bacon balls of anxiety and paranoia before the wall of examining lights. And the fascination with each other’s bodies, pointing at each other, moving each other’s limbs, referencing the rise in anatomy and the new interest in the material body, the limbs, the innards, dissection. At other times the bodies writhed on top of each other while the music snarled and burped – animal sex in an age of flesh and reason, the frank exploration of each other, the use of each other for pleasure, the absence of God. And the body as object, to be carried, placed, poked, positioned, looked on, suddenly resisting and becoming the body as subject, autonomous, suffering, worthy of dignity (but why, if it has no soul?)

Anyway, below is a video of some of the dancing, and below that is McGregor talking about Porter and also his interest in cognitive science. He says cognitive science helped him understand the construction and deconstruction of habits, including physical habits – he tries to get his dancers to become aware of their physical habits in order to unpick them, which sounds like the ballet version of CBT (and also reminds me of the work of Gurdjieff). Apparently McGregor has worked with cognitive scientists on previous work, and was even involved in an AHRB-funded project on ‘choreography and cognition’. There’s a rather good documentary out there called Thought In Motion which talks about his work – he discusses it a bit in this clip as well. Seems like he’s challenging the idea that dance is somehow non-cognitive, or intuitive, or instinctual etc. He’s insisting it’s a cognitive-physical process.

I wonder what other cultural history classics would make good dances? Elias’ The Civilising Process? Huizinga’s Homo Ludus? Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class? EP Thompson’s Time, Work-Discipline and Industrial Capitalism? The possibilities are endless…

History of emotions conferences 2012

Posted on March 16, 2012 by

The History of Emotions email list regularly carries calls for papers and announcements of conferences in the field. I thought it would be useful to gather together into a single place a list of links to information about all the forthcoming conferences I’m aware of for the rest of 2012. The list starts with ‘Moving Modernisms’ in Oxford in March and ends with ‘Shame and Shaming’ in Berlin in December. If I have missed out any conferences with a history of emotions theme, then do please email me to let me know, and I’ll update this post.

Moving Modernisms. The Faculty of English and New College, University of Oxford. 21–24 March 2012

Passions: Five Centuries of Art and the Emotions. Exhibition and related events and workshops at the National Museum of Sweden, March-August 2012.

‘The Stress of Life’ : Gender, Emotions and Health  after the Second World War. Exeter, 2-3 April 2012. Centre for Medical History.

Emotions: From Private Domain to Public Space. Paris, 11-13 April, 2012.

Emotional History of Modern Anti-Semitism. Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions, Berlin. 16-18 April 2012.

Psychology, Emotion, and the Human Sciences. University of Windsor, Ontario, Canada. 20-21 April 2012

Regulating Emotions: Contemporary Understandings and Interdisciplinary Perspectives. University of Limerick. 30 April – 1 May 2012.

Emotions, Passions, and Power in Renaissance Italy. Georgetown Univeristy at Villa Le Balze, Florence. 7-8 May 2012.

Thinking Feeling: Critical Theory, Culture, Feeling. University of Sussex.18-19 May 2012

Making Sense of Past Emotions. University of Copenhagen. 25 May 2012.

Rhetoric and the Emotions from Antiquity to the Modern Era – series of three seminars by Professor Rita Copeland. Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities, London.  9, 16, and 23 May 2012.

New Histories of Love and Romance, c.1880-1960. Cardiff. 25–26 May 2012. University of Glamorgan.

Emotions and Capitalism. Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions, Berlin. 28–30 June 2012

Passions and Emotions in Ancient and Modern Philosophy. Assos, Turkey, ‘Philosophy in Assos’. 2-5 July 2012.

Art, Aesthetics and the Emotions. Summer school of the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences, 22-29 August 2012.

Emotions, Health and Wellbeing (Society for the Social History of Medicine Biennial Conference). Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, London, 10-12 September 2012

The Authenticity of Emotions: Sceptical and Sympathetic Sociability in the Eighteenth-Century British Public Sphere. ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, University of Adelaide. 18-19 September 2012.

Pain as Emotion; Emotion as Pain: Perspectives from Modern History.
Birkbeck, University of London. 26 October 2012.

Shakespeare and Emotions. University of Perth. ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. 27–30 November 2012

Childhood, Youth and Emotions in Modern History. Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Center for the History of Emotions, Berlin. 29 November – 1 December, 2012.

Shame and Shaming in 20th-Century Europe. MPI, Berlin. 6–7 December, 2012.

Grave emotions

Posted on March 14, 2012 by

Jenny Nyberg (right) investigating a seventeenth-century grave in the Brahe Church, Visingsö, Sweden. Photographer: Robin Gullbrandsson, Jönköping County Museum

Jenny Nyberg, MA in archaeology and BA in History, is an associate research student visiting the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions during February and March 2012. She is usually based at Stockholm University as a PhD candidate in archaeology. In her thesis she investigates beliefs, emotions and attitudes towards death in early modern Protestant Sweden (1500-1800) by studying the material remains of burial rituals. By looking at how the dead body was prepared, dressed and adorned, and what objects were included with the dead in the coffin, she is tracing understandings of death and acts that were driven by beliefs and emotions. This guest post summarizes some of the results and ideas that she presented at her lunchtime seminar at Queen Mary on 1 March 2012 entitled ‘For to me to live is Christ and to die is gain. The study of beliefs and emotions through Swedish early modern graves’.

Throughout the early modern period the body of the deceased was commonly prepared at home, shown during the wake or when laid in the coffin, and then often kept at home before closing the coffin lid and departing to church for the funeral. We know from written sources that many people gave detailed directions on how their funeral was to be held – including asking to be dressed or shrouded in a particular garment or material. The final product, that is the grave, can in many cases be seen as a negotiation between the wishes of the dead and the living. Key to my interpretations is that preparing the body and keeping it at home enabled the bereaved to physically relate to it – both during a collective ritual and perhaps also in a more private manner – before the coffin was closed.

Convinced that not only the act of social transformation of the dead, but equally the expressions of emotions are essential to understanding burial practices, I’m trying to develop a theoretical framework for understanding how emotions were expressed through material actions in the ritual context and how and why those expressions changed over time. Such a framework must recognize that emotions are entangled with other aspects of social and cultural meaning and experience; such as social identity, gender, age, religious beliefs – but also emotional beliefs, since what people thought of emotions itself influenced their experience of them and thereby also how they were expressed.

In their 1986 article ‘The Anthropology of Emotions’, Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey White presented an overview of the anthropological research dealing with the relationship between ritual and emotional expression. The ritual has been seen as allowing a channeling and “working through” of emotions, as distancing people from emotions, as an aid in expressing spontaneous emotion and as only occasionally aiding people in their “emotional work”. The way I see it, all of these statements can be true – and this is because the participants are all individuals – each individual most likely also entering the ritual with different state of minds.

What they all have in common is a commitment to take part in collective actions out of the ordinary; a commitment made possible since the form and purpose of the ritual are stipulated beforehand. For the social transformation of ritual to take place each actor must either internalize or formally submit to the norms of the collective (Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994).

The graves I study are the results of ritual acts legitimized by the collective, where the emotional norms and values of a society have been expressed – partly through material practice. As pointed out by Sarah Tarlow, a pioneer within the archaeology of emotions since her 1999 publication Bereavement and Commemoration. An Archaeology of Mortality, recurring material patterns therefore mirror those values. This is not a far cry from historian Barbara Rosenwein’s idea of emotional communities, meaning social groups that share “the same valuations of emotions and their expression”. The “feeling rules” within the particular community would have provided a spectrum of culturally accepted ways to express emotions during the ritual.

Let us now direct our focus to how the Swedish nobility dressed their dead for burial in the 1600s and how that changes within the following century. At the beginning of this period women, children and men were dressed in clothes worn in life made of luxurious materials – velvet or silk. The photograph below shows a detail of the elaborate gold embroidered dress of a noble woman who died shortly after childbirth in 1653; the dress was most likely her old wedding dress.

Detail from an embroidered dress found in a grave in the Brahe Church, Visingsö, Sweden. Photo by: Göran Sandstedt, Jönköping county museum.

The festive and luxurious way of dressing the dead in the seventeenth century should be seen in the framework of funerals being big, expensive gatherings where the dead were dressed up for their final festivity. Apart from funerals being arenas where the status of the nobility, believed to be conferred by nature, could be manifested, created and re-created – displaying grandeur becoming almost a virtue – death was also portrayed as a celebration.

How then shall we understand this seventeenth-century metaphor of death as a celebration? I believe we need to relate it to contemporary understandings of emotions – or rather passions and affections. They were both believed to stem from the soul. Passions, were strong, appetite-driven stirrings that should be avoided by Christians. Affections were moderate, virtuous, and godly and associated with intellect. Religion therefore offered a correct mode of mourning. Passions of excessive grief could suggest both selfishness and doubts about the wonderful nature of afterlife; they could constitute an affront towards God. Although one can discuss how far scholarly ideas on passions and affections reached into the lives of “ordinary people”, it is clear that this ideal of moderate mourning was internalized by people with examples also prevalent in the folklore. Grieving for a person too much would hinder their entrance into Heaven. The rhetoric of death was therefore a very positive one. When going through written firsthand accounts, like diaries, it is however obvious that the bereaved could have trouble resigning to the will of God.

Towards the turn of the century, around 1700, there is a remarkable shift towards simpler shrouds more similar to night clothes. Instead of silk and velvet, white linen is now used. Although these simpler shrouds existed earlier in the century, likely a demonstration of piety, now even the royals are shrouded in this simpler fashion. The metaphor of death as a celebration is now replaced by the metaphor of death as a peaceful sleep.

So how are we to understand this development? There is evidence that this shift was wanted. During the latter half of the seventeenth century, laws were passed – some on the demand of the nobility and burghers themselves – to limit the number of participants allowed at the wake to mere relatives, and to make the burial ritual less extravagant – among other things minimizing funeral processions. I think that what we have here is a more family oriented view on death and a different relationship to God, where the grand rituals of the earlier period now appeared hollow and meaningless to the bereaved. A new virtuous ideal of economizing had also gained hegemony as burghers during the seventeenth century were offered to work their way up the state ladder, the majority of them given noble titles. The simplicity can also be related to a more privately held religion influenced by Pietism and the Moravian church spread from Germany.

With wishes from both burghers and nobility to make the ritual simpler – we appear to have an emotional community transcending the boundaries of social groups coming to the fore. I would like to see this emerging as both a response to changes in social identities and religion but at the same time to recognize that expressions of emotions have contributed to those changes. This view would interpret burial rituals as something similar to William Reddy’s “emotives: emotional utterances – in this case performed and material utterances – that have impacts on their surroundings.

Rather than viewing the burial ritual as an arena that simply canalizes or restrains emotions, perhaps we can also see it as a place where emotions are created, recreated and also changed through material “emotives” performed by the participants?

If a religious model of the experiences of emotions is part of the explanation for the seventeenth-century metaphor of death as a celebration – how then can the experiences of emotions have changed throughout the following century, affecting how emotions were expressed towards the dead body during the burial ritual?

Jenny Nyberg is very happy to receive thoughts, comments, or recommended scholarly literature, particularly on ritual and emotional expressions and why they change, by email at jenny.nyberg@ark.su.se

TEDEd: How pandemics spread

Posted on March 13, 2012 by

This is a video I made with Patrick Blower for TED Education, part of a series of animations by TED ED which will take the form of short ‘lessons’, to be used as teaching aids or triggers for deeper explorations of the subject. The animation on pandemics is designed to be used in either a science, history, or public health class for age groups from 11 up to undergraduate level. For a more nuanced treatment of the same subject from a more historical perspective you might like to direct people to my paper on ‘putting pandemics in perspective‘ for History & Policy.

Moving parts: Peter Carey’s The Chemistry of Tears

Posted on March 10, 2012 by

Dr Stephanie Downes is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Melbourne, where she is part of the ARC Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions. In Australia, Peter Carey’s new novel has just been published. It is due out in the UK next month. In this guest post, Stephanie reviews the book for the History of Emotions Blog.

The title of Peter Carey’s new novel, The Chemistry of Tears, practically begs to be (over-)analysed. Scientific rationalism alongside passionate emotionality; the manufactured and the organic; the brain and the heart. On the cover of the Australian edition is printed part of John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Lady Agnew of Lochnaw, with a close up of her mouth. So blown-up is the image that what we see are not the brushstrokes of the artist but the digitized pixels of the copy. The title itself is printed in cutouts which suggest that beneath the woman’s pixilated skin are the cogs and wheels of a machine. Layer upon layer, the novel offers its own portrait of a woman in pieces in the twenty-first century, and the role played by technologies in our emotional lives.

The title doesn’t focus, however, on any one emotion (say, sadness), or even on the physical sign of that emotion (say, crying), but on a material manifestation: tears, both as objects, and as subject of analysis, too. How they ‘work’ and what they represent. Since the novel is structured as a narrative-in-a-narrative, one in the nineteenth century and the other in the present day, it won’t hurt to evoke Tennyson on the complexity of understanding what it is to cry: ‘Tears, idle tears, I know not what they mean’!

Carey’s titular ‘tears’ might evoke sadness or melancholy, for centuries the subject of scientific investigation. (Lars Von Trier’s recent film, Melancholia, looks back to this history of astrology and bodily humours in the giant planet that threatens Earth’s existence.) The novel, however, is very specific in identifying the source of its protagonist’s tears: Carey’s crying woman has lost a loved one, and his is a portrait of her grief. The central character conforms at various points to the classical motif of the female mourner, complete with wailing (‘I began to howl and could not stop’), renting of clothes (‘I tore my shirt in half, and ripped the sleeves away’), and matting of hair (‘Three trains later I surfaced at Olympia with unwashed hair.’)

Carey has set this new work in a museum, the fictional but curiously familiar Swinburne Museum, ‘one of London’s almost-secret treasure-houses.’ The novel, too, is crammed with objects, which include both the simple – a sock, a lover’s hat, a bottle of vodka – and the structured – a clock, a mechanical animal, a robot, a mobile phone, or ‘Frankenpod’ in Carey-speak. The technological and the human, however, don’t contrast so much as they overlap, and the novel moves around the idea of emotional response as the human machine at its most intricate.

The protagonist, Catherine Gehrig, a specialist in the restoration of clockwork, hears on the opening page of the death of her lover of thirteen years. We learn immediately that the affair was both in-office and extramarital and that Catherine’s mourning, like her love, must be lived in private. When the novel begins the death has already occured. ‘Dead’ is its first word. Dead, too, is the inanimate object which is its central metaphor, a mechanical duck or automaton, which Catherine is charged with repairing. The thing about the duck, however, is that it is insistently lifelike: it eats, flaps its wings, excretes. The bird arrives in pieces – 8 tea chests and 4 wooden boxes – which Catherine reassembles as the novel unfolds.

Plan for Jacques de Vaucanson's mechanical, digesting duck.

Interleaved with Catherine’s narrative are letters written by a nineteenth-century Englishman, Henry Brandling, to his dying son. Henry is in the process of commissioning the bird as a gift for his son: to enchant him back to health with sheer delight. His plans for the machine are based on those of the real life eighteenth-century Jacques de Vaucanson’s Canard Digérateur – the Digesting Duck.

That the novel ultimately stretches across at least three centuries and evokes a plethora of cultural associations helps to raise the issue of tears in the present for those of us interested in a history of emotions, and of literary representations of emotions. When do we shed tears in twenty-first century Australia? England? Other parts of the world? And when – and how – do we write about them?

There’s a description of a minor female character crying in the first chapter – ‘bawling,’ Carey puts it repeatedly – ‘her lipstick […] smeared and her mouth folded like an ugly sock.’ A few pages later, Catherine, in the first throes of her grief, takes up the same motif: ‘I bawled and bawled and now I was the one whose mouth became a sock puppet.’ The protagonist seems to imitate the behaviour she’d seen earlier even to the point of evoking the same metaphor. It’s a familiar script to most readers, too, made more familiar still with the intrusion of that crumpled sock. We all cry, we all have crumpled socks, or, at the very least, we know what they look like. Comedy and tragedy, we’re reminded, like laughter and crying, are something alike, especially in contorting mouths.

Catherine’s lost love – what Freud calls, in Mourning and Melancholia, a ‘lost love-object’ – is almost distressingly absent from the novel. On one hand, it is hard to feel Catherine’s grief, because we don’t understand what it is that she has lost. Matthew survives for us as for Catherine only in fragments, objects like his car, a floppy hat, an old email. A colleague happened to pass on a link to a blog post on ‘blobjects’ just as I was getting into Carey’s novel. Rather than words or gestures, ‘Blobjects’ are abstract objects that communicate feeling. How do the real objects in our lives express emotion, or even contain them? How do we remember those we’ve lost, and relate to those who are living?

And what about the duck? Inanimate and unfeeling, it’s also humanized and strangely humanizing. As Carey builds his metaphor, and Catherine rebuilds the machine, it becomes a metaphor of extreme artifice, which turns playfully on any number of clichés associated with the process of grief: rebuilding a life, mending, fixing, picking up the pieces; coping mechanisms. What does the defecating duck wryly hint about human existence? And do the clocks of the novel themselves suggest that ‘time heals all wounds’? I hasten to point out at this juncture that even Catherine herself isn’t immune to such over-analysis of the events in her life. She emails the head curator of horology (Eric ‘Crofty’ – do I hear ‘Crafty,’ here?), who has charged her with the task of repairing the automaton, that it is ‘highly “inappropriate” to give a grieving woman the task of simulating life.’

'Mater Dolorosa' (1470s), workshop of Dirk Bouts (National Gallery)

The medievalist in me wants to go one step further still… The literary landscape of the Middle Ages is littered with crying women, from the Virgin Mary to Margery Kempe. Catherine’s medieval namesake is a saint and a martyr. Surely it’s no accident, with all the clocks and cogs of the novel, that St Catherine was martyred on the wheel? But there is something of the Mary in Carey’s Catherine, too, who is perhaps more ‘Magdalen’ than ‘Virgin.’ Catherine is grieving for a lover with whom she has been having an affair. Hers are tears of grief and, perhaps, of shame (another recent topic on this blog).

And yet, for all this talk of tears, I don’t think Carey’s is a novel about expressing emotions so much as it is about reading them. The novel begins with identical portraits of two women crying. But it also starts with an emotional cue that’s been misread. When Catherine finds the secretary crying at her desk with her mouth like a crumpled sock, she asks her what is wrong. Presumably her sobs muffle her words, because Catherine misunderstands her reply:

‘Oh haven’t you heard? Mr Tindall’s dead.’

What I heard was: ‘Mr Tindall hurt his head.’ I thought, for God’s sake, pull yourself together.

(More women going to pieces in grief.) Is this opening sequence a comment on the interpretation of emotion? We often talk about ‘reading’ emotion of the face of another, and Carey’s novel often documents reading practices in general. First, it presents a narrative within a narrative: as Catherine’s grief unfolds and the mechanical duck is rebuilt she reads Henry’s letters to his son. Inside the letters, the fictional Herr Sumper, charged with building the duck, interprets the plans according to whims of his own. Letters, plans, formulas, faces, and bodies both mechanical and human, all become scripts for various characters to read and attempt to understand, even, to impose understanding on. When Catherine first picks up Henry’s letters, she observes that:

All my feelings were displaced, but it was definitely this peculiar style of handwriting that engaged my tender sympathy, for I had decided that the writer had been driven mad. […] I had no doubt he was a man, and I pitied him before I read a word.

The novel is structured not just by Catherine’s restoration of the duck, or Henry’s account of its commissioning, but Catherine’s experience of reading that account. Some chapters present the letters to us in Henry’s own words (‘Henry’) and others (‘Catherine & Henry’) offer the letters refracted through the protagonist’s own reading of their ‘mechanical handwriting’. The ‘Catherine’ chapters were the ones I found most enjoyable. There was something jarringly metaphysical about the nineteenth-century sections of the novel, too dreamlike, murky, and ambiguous; too open to interpretation; almost too hard to read.

Is it all, by the end, just another device, or piece of literary mechanics? Is Carey’s real target the critic – those who read writers?

One Australian reviewer called the novel ‘profoundly moving’. The cliché doesn’t really inspire the preordering of copies on Amazon in time for the novel’s Easter weekend release in the UK. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, however, many a novel’s success was judged not by copies sold, but by the number of tears its readers shed. To be ‘profoundly moved’ suggests that emotions are deep, but that the act of reading might better connect us with them.

That’s the thing about Vaucanson’s duck, of course: it moves. But does Carey’s?

A reviewer for Melbourne’s The Age praised the novel’s tricks and mechanics, but lamented that ‘not once, curse my metallic heart, did Carey’s intricate mechanical duck actually make me cry.’ I confess, I didn’t cry either. Was I moved, like the first reviewer? I can’t quite recall. But perhaps this confusion is exactly the desired effect. If this is a novel about the reading experience then maybe this displacement from the experience of emotion makes perfect sense. We observe with almost scientific detachment the novel’s portrait of grief, and we recognize that various emotional templates are applied. Tears, idle tears…. The tears in Carey’s novel seem to be working very hard indeed. As Catherine cries over memories of her lover, a character consoles that ‘tears produced by emotions are chemically different from those we need for lubrication. So my shameful little tissues, he said, now contained […] a powerful natural painkiller.’ Catherine winds up (no pun intended) laughing at the same memories.

Tears transform. And the duck moves, all right. Like a well-lubricated machine. But it’s the human body in Carey’s novel, with its signs and sensors, functions and excretions – the body as text and author – that really cries out to be read.

The ‘Lynx epidemic’

Posted on March 7, 2012 by

The Centre’s Mark Honigsbaum, who studies the social and emotional experience of epidemics, might find this somewhat trashy advert for Lynx interesting (then again, he may not). You can see how the admen are trying to tie their product in to the cinematic language of plague / zombie films. Now I’m no Don Draper, but why do you want a deodorant ad to summon up associations with zombies and plagues? Also, why would you want to wear a deodorant that apparently drives zoo animals into a frenzy? And is the European politician who appears at the end, the one who can’t stop himself jumping onto a female reporter, meant to be Dominique Strauss-Kahn? Perhaps his lawyer could use it as a defence: ‘It wasn’t his fault, m’lud…it was the Lynx effect.’ I particularly like the last line of the advert: ‘Do not buy Lynx Attract’. OK – I won’t!