emily martin - the potentiality of ethnography and the limits of affect theory

The Potentiality of Ethnography and the Limits of Affect TheoryAuthor(s): Emily MartinSource: Current Anthropology, Vol. 54, No. S7, Potentiality and Humanness: Revisiting theAnthropological Object in Contemporary Biomedicine (October 2013), pp. S149-S158Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of Wenner-Gren Foundation for AnthropologicalResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/670388 .Accessed: 13/11/2013 05:51

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Current Anthropology Volume 54, Supplement 7, October 2013 S149

2013 by The Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research. All rights reserved. 0011-3204/2013/54S7-0016$10.00. DOI: 10.1086/670388

The Potentiality of Ethnography and theLimits of Affect Theory

by Emily Martin

Historical scholarship on the banishment of subjectivity from experimental psychology led me to explore a currenttheoretical enterprise in literary and cultural studies that goes by the name affect theory. This approach, tied tocontemporary neuroscience research, at once joins the effort to banish subjectivity from human experience andintroduces the apparently compelling merits of a certain kind of potentiality. The potentiality revealed by affecttheory lies deep in the human brain, hidden below the level of conscious intentionality. Affect theory draws on along history in the human sciences going back to the late nineteenth century. Therefore, in this paper I take a freshlook at the early history of experimental psychology from the vantage point of the Cambridge AnthropologicalExpedition to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898. I intend this early anthropological approach to subjectivity to serveas a thought-provoking counterpoint to the later banishment of subjectivity from the methods used in experimentalpsychology and from the models proposed in affect theory.

In a recent foray into an ethnography of experimental cog-nitive psychology, I encountered firsthand what the historicalbanishment of subjectivity from the experimental modelmeans. Because it was so difficult to gain ethnographic accessto any of the many psychology labs I approachedrun bycolleagues, neighbors, and even friendsI resorted to par-ticipating as a volunteer subject in various currently ongoingexperiments accessible through the websites of all major psy-chology departments. I was struck by how irrelevant my ex-perience as a subject was to the experimenters. In one ex-periment, for example, I was hooked up to electrodes usedto measure small facial movements of which I was unawarethat would indicate my emotional responses to photographspresented on the computer screen in front of me. I pressedkeys on the keyboard to register my conscious responses tothese images. A software program tallied the results. My re-sponses were produced, I was told, by specific parts of mybrain. What the researchers sought were data about how mybrain reacted to the photographs. But there were confoundingelements all over the place in this experimental setting. Forexample, although the monitor I was to attend to and makemy responses to was right in front of me, just on my left wasanother monitor that showed the varying electrical impulsesfrom my electrodes. I noted to the experimenter that I couldeasily see the readout of my own responses, and she said,Thats fine; it doesnt matter. But it mattered to me. I could

Emily Martin is Professor in the Department of Anthropology, NewYork University (25 Waverly Place, New York, New York 10003,U.S.A. [[email protected]]). This paper was submitted 18 VI 12,accepted 1 III 13, and electronically published 22 V 13.

not help trying to catch a glance of the varying signal, and Iwondered how this distraction might affect my responses.

Puzzlement over the origins of this current lack of interestin subjectivity led me to the work of historians of psychologywho have described how subjective experience, introspec-tion, was central to early German laboratory psychology un-der the tutelage of Wilhelm Wundt. Subjective experience wasalso central for the late nineteenth-century anthropologicalexpedition to the Torres Strait Islands, whose members carriedout many psychological experiments on the Wundt model(Richards 1998). Strikingly, introspection largely came to beruled out of experimental settings in psychology by the mid-twentieth century (Bayer 1998; Danziger 1990; Morawski1994). In due course, interest in what a subjects brain wasdoing supplanted interest in the subjects experience. My in-terest in the historical banishment of subjectivity from ex-perimental psychology made me wonder about a current the-oretical enterprise in literary and cultural studies that goes bythe name affect theory. This approach, tied to contemporaryneuroscience research, at once joins the effort to banish sub-jectivity from human experience and introduces the appar-ently compelling merits of a certain kind of potentiality. Thepotentiality revealed by affect theory lies deep in the humanbrain, hidden below the level of conscious intentionality. Af-fect theory thus draws on a long history in the human sciencesgoing back to the late nineteenth century. To explore whathas been gained and lost in this extended process, I havedivided this paper into three parts.

In the first part of this paper, I follow the banishment ofsubjectivity historically by tracing what was involved whenhuman beings came to be treated as experimental psycho-logical subjects in the late nineteenth to early twentieth-

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S150 Current Anthropology Volume 54, Supplement 7, October 2013

century expeditions and laboratories organized in Cambridge,England. My goal in this part of the paper is to identify thespecifically anthropological approach to the experimental sub-ject used in early psychological experiments. Expedition mem-bersphysicians, anthropologists, and psychologistsintro-duced an arresting way of understanding the meaning ofhuman social practices as inextricable from their social con-text and from their subjectivity. I intend this early anthro-pological approach to subjectivity to serve as a thought-provoking counterpoint to the later banishment ofsubjectivity from the methods used in experimental psy-chology and from the models proposed in affect theory.

In the second part of the paper, I turn to contemporaryexperimental neuropsychology and to the ways a number ofhumanities and social science disciplines are using its findingsin affect theory as a way of tapping a particular kind ofpotentiality: a hidden force emanating from fruitful darkness.This darkness, one we have ignored, is located in primitiveparts of the brain where precognitive processes occur. Mygoal in this part of the paper is to ask whether positing thatthere is a realm in the brain filled with potential, an un-limited realm that is before and unfettered by meaning, threat-ens loss of the most valuable aspect of the early anthropo-logical conception of human psychic capacities. In the thirdpart of the paper, I present some thoughts about how theinsights of the early anthropological researchers could be re-covered and deployed as an antidote to affect theory.

Early History of the Experimental HumanSubject in Psychology and Anthropology

Experimental psychology is the discipline that has, perhapsmore than any other, exerted experimental controls over hu-man beings. What is important for this paper are the yearsbefore the process of ruling out subjective experience wascomplete, starting from the vantage point of early anthro-pological and psychological field expeditions. It was the psy-chological research conducted during and after the CambridgeAnthropological Expedition to the Torres Strait Islands in1898 that had an important influence on Ludwig Wittgen-steins critique of experimental psychology in the 1950s. Thisconnection has helped me see how to give the ethnographicmethod a firmer grip in the face of currently fashionable,neurologically oriented accounts of the human mind, in par-ticular, affect theory, to which I turn in the third part of thispaper.

Wundts Introspective Methods

First, here is some background about the ancestor of theCambridge researchers, Wundts psychological laboratory inLeipzig, and its introspective methods. The experiments inWundts laboratory all depended on the precise measurementof time. Historians Ruth Benschop and Deborah Coon have

written in detail about the technologies that enabled time tobe measured in a standardized way and recorded accurately.As Coon explains, laboratory hardware standardized and reg-ulated the physical stimuli to which the subject would re-spond, and it also gave quantified, standardized output to

the introspective method. Perhaps even more important, the

subject himself had to be standardized. Even though in the

early stages of psychologys development, typical experimental

subjects were professors and graduate students, not experi-

mentally naive college sophomores and white rats, there was

still too much individual variation among these flesh-and-

bone introspecting instruments. In order to standardize them-

selves as experimental observers, therefore, psychologists re-

sorted to long and rigorous introspective training periods.

. . . Only if introspectors themselves were standardized could

they become interchangeable parts in the production of scien-

tific psychological knowledge (Coon 1993:775; italics added).

Edwin Boring (1953), a historian of psychology, reports that

Wundt insisted that no observer who had performed less

than 10,000 of these introspectively controlled reactions was

suitable to provide data for published research (172).

Standardization also extended to regularity outside the

context of experimental practice (Benschop and Draaisma

2000:19). One of Wundts students, the American James Cat-

tell, relates how he followed a strict scheme of physical ex-

ercise, and he remarks in a letter to his parents that he and

the other experimenters were required to walk 36 miles a

day (Benschop and Draaisma 2000:1819; Cattell and Sokal

1981:89). In sum, as the psychologist Edward Titchener ex-

plained in 1912, it was not that the subject should be hooked

up to machines, it was that the subject had virtually become

the machine, capable of automatic introspection (Coon 1993:

776). In this experimental setup, the subject would be pre-

sented with a stimulus (a word or a color), and the time

would be carefully recorded. With training, the subject could

register the exact time at which he had recognized the stimulus

(understood the words meaning or thought of the colors

name). The difference between the two times was the reaction

time: the delay between the appearance of the stimulus and

the minds psychological, introspective recognition of the

stimulus.

Wundt and his collaborators aimed at measuring processes

in what has been called the generalized mind, those parts

of mental life shared by all human adults alike. As Benschop

(Benschop and Draaisma 2000) explains, Being practised in

appearing in experiments helped to make sure that the results

were representative of the universal features of adult human

mental life (5859). Viewing the subject as having a gen-

eralized mind meant that experimenter and observer could

switch roles between trials without affecting the format of the

experiments. A person could run the experimental apparatus

one day and be a subject in the same experiment the next.

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Martin The Potentiality of Ethnography S151

Cattell and the Lip Key

Into this system came an earthquake. The American JamesCattell, who was pursuing his PhD in Wundts Leipzig lab inthe 1880s, realized at a certain point that he was unable tocarry out Wundts directions. As he explained,

When I was a student in the Leipzig laboratory, attempts

were being made to measure the time of perception by

letting the subject react as soon as he knew from intro-

spection that an object had been perceived. . . . I attempted

to continue these experiments, but, feeling no confidence

in the validity of my introspection in such a case, took up

strictly objective methods in which a movement followed a

stimulus without the slightest dependence on introspection.

(Cattell and Sokal 1981:335)

What did this mean? Wundts method was to let the subjectreact as quickly as possible in trial 1 and then in trial 2 waituntil he distinguished the impression (like recognizing acolor or understanding a word). The difference between thetwo times gave the perception-time (Cattell and Sokal 1981:99). Cattell (Cattell and Sokal 1981) explains his problem: Ihave not been able myself to get results by this method; Iapparently either distinguished the impression and made themotion simultaneously, or if I tried to avoid this by waitinguntil I had formed a distinct impression before I make themotion . . . I added to the simple reaction, not only a per-ception [i.e., a discrimination], but also a volition [i.e., achoice] (65). What was Cattells solution to this problem?In 1886 he added an instrument to the experiment, namely,the lip key. This was an electric switch the subject held betweenhis lips. When he was in the act of perceiving a color or aword, it was assumed that he would move his lips uncon-sciously, as if silently naming the object of his perception.Hence, the lip key would register the time of the perceptionwithout the need for any problematic conscious introspectionon the part of the subject.

Why does such a minute-seeming change as the lip keyloom so large? It was at this moment that Cattell joined themind to the brain. As soon as he finished his experimentsusing the lip key, he adopted a relentlessly physicalist per-spective and questioned whether purely mental qualities ex-isted. This was in 1886! As he explained this transition, ittakes time for light waves to work on the retina and to gen-erate in cells a nervous impulse corresponding to the light.It takes time for a nervous impulse to be conveyed along theoptic nerve to the brain. It takes time for a nervous impulseto be conveyed through the brain to the visual center. It takestime for a nervous impulse to bring about changes in thevisual center corresponding to its own nature, and to thenature of the external stimulus (Cattell 1886:220). When allthis has happened, the subject sees a red light. The sensationor perception of red does not take any time. The sensationof a red light is a state of consciousness corresponding to acertain condition of the brain (220). This immediacy is par-

allel to the chemical changes in a galvanic battery: the chem-ical changes take time, but when they have happened thecurrent does not take any additional time. The current isthe immediate representative of these changes (Cattell 1886:220; Cattell and Sokal 1981:334335). He concluded, Mentalstates correspond to physical changes in the brain; hence-forth, his goal was to inquire into the time needed to bringabout changes in the brain, and thus to determine the rapidityof thought (Cattell 1886:241). The times he recorded werenow for cerebral processes without the intrusion of intro-spection. Cattells innovation paved the way for what Danzigerwas to call the relentless discounting of the subjects experi-ence in experimental psychology by the 1950s.

Torres Strait Islands: The Generalized Mind

Cattell opened a new road, but others continued to travel oldroads. Scientists on the Cambridge Anthropological Expedi-tion to the Torres Strait Islands in 1898 continued under-standings and practices sympathetic to Wundts introspection.The members of the expedition included W. H. R. Rivers, C.S. Myers, and Charles Seligman, among others, under theleadership of Alfred Cort Haddon. Because the expeditionsscientists assumed that the social and natural environmentdetermined the way the mind perceived the world, they alsoassumed that after immersion in the daily life of villagers onthe islands, they could serve as appropriate experimental sub-jects comparable with the native inhabitants. This enabledtheir introspective reports of the time they took to react toa stimulus to be measured and compared with the reports ofnative Torres Strait Islanders. The notion of a generalizedmind (now extended to these islanders) entailed that the con-text in which such minds were trained determined their spe-cific characteristics and made them commensurable.1 For thisreason, as in the Wundt lab, experimenters and subjects couldtrade places. In one expedition photograph we see W. H. R.Rivers sitting in front of the color wheel, a device used tomeasure perception of different colors. Rivers and his TorresStrait companion Tom are seated on the same side of thetable because Rivers is showing Tom how to use the colorwheel. Tom is being trained to operate the device in order togather perceptual information from the expedition scientists(Kuklick 1998; Richards 1998).

These practices were especially well articulated by Rivers,who believed that a resident of the Torres Straits Islands wasno different from any of Rivers experimental subjectsin-cluding Rivers himself (Kuklick 1998:174). Rivers explicitly

1. At the time of the Torres Strait expedition, the psychologists on theteam (W. H. R. Rivers and C. S. Myers) were haunted by the widelyaccepted evolutionary theories of Herbert Spencer that primitives sur-passed civilised people in psychophysical performance because moreenergy remained devoted to this level in the former instead of beingdiverted to higher functions, a central tenet of late Victorian scientificracism (Richards 1998:137). Despite this, their experiments did not findsignificant differences in the predicted direction.



trained himself to participate with the minds of Torres StraitIslanders: he imagined he could immerse himself in the livesof the islanders and faithfully follow their way of life: Ifthe anthropologist conducted himself as his subjects did, hewould become an embodied instrument, literally thinking andfeeling as they did (Kuklick 2011:21). The Cambridge Ex-pedition scientists realized that this immersion had its limits:they could not embody the past experience of islanders. So,for example, when they saw that hearing was strikingly di-minished in some villagers, they attributed this to previousinjury from diving for shells among coral reefs (Haddon etal. 1935:286).2

I am suggesting that there is resonance between these prac-tices and the ideas behind Wundts laboratory training aimedto make subjects comparable through experience of the sameregimen. In the Cambridge Expedition, the regimen entailedimmersion in the environment and social life of the islanders.Perhaps the expedition scientists were on the cusp of a pro-found challenge to the assumptions of Wundtian experimentalpsychology: they pushed the meaning of the generalizedmind far beyond where the Leipzig experimenters intendedby including children and primitives. They also took theidea of being an embodied instrument further than theWundtians by taking the experimental system and its trainingregimen to a different culture altogether. They were stuck onthe cusp, however. Their comparative charts between the Tor-res Strait Islands and British villages did assume that one couldset reaction times from experiments in these different placesalongside one another.

Bringing Back Context

If shared context was essential to produce minds that couldbe compared in experiments, shared context was also im-portant to achieve communication with readers back home.The expedition members were extraordinarily devoted tobringing back as detailed a record of the islanders way of lifeas possible, as if to immerse their British audience in theislands environment.3 There were published descriptions, sixvolumes worth, but also music recorded on wax cylindersand sound recorded with the rhythmograph; this was nec-essary, according to Myers (Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912),because many kinds of barbaric music have rhythms so com-plicated that the metronome is useless, and must be recordedmechanically (217). They made the first ethnographic filmsin spite of the limited technology of the time.4

2. They described this labor as the result of ruthless exploitation bytraders until the 1881 Pearl-Shell and Beche-de-Mer Fishery Act waspassed regulating the engagement and employment of natives (Haddonet al. 1935:14).

3. Of course, any expedition worth its salt would bring back shiploadsof documents and artifacts (Jardine 2000).

4. See MacDougall (1978). Haddon took a Lumiere camera to theTorres Strait, but despite his high hopes for the medium, it was not takenup seriously again until after the Second World War.

In addition they sought to make a complete record of allsensory modalities: smell, hearing, vision, touch, and taste.In the published report, they cite comparisons (common atthe time) asserting similarities between the acute senses ofnonhuman animals and savages as what their experimentsset out to confirm or deny. In all cases they denied or at leastcomplicated such comparisons by gathering evidence that is-landers could have less acute hearing or vision than membersof the expedition.

But besides capturing what people could hear and see phys-ically, they also tried to capture how the islanders saw thingsqualitatively. They collected islanders perceptions of naturalphenomena, ritual beings, and ordinary objects by askingthem to make drawings of how they saw the sun and moon,ritual beings, and canoes. Though the expedition membersthought the islanders lacked the components of high culturefamiliar to them from the cities of Britain and Europe, theyinsisted that the islanders could meaningfully render the ob-jects that were significant to them: People of low culture areoften admirable draughtsmen and every opportunity shouldbe taken to make them draw, to illustrate objects of all kinds(Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912:110).

Ethnographic Methods

Despite their resonances with Wundtian psychology, expe-dition scientists often departed from expectations appropriateto the laboratory, devising an early (and underappreciated)version of the ethnographic method. I will mention threeaspects of their method here.

First, the expedition members took comparison two ways.They immersed themselves in the island environment, butthey also extended their experimental comparisons back tothe British Isles. In their studies of smell, hearing acuity, andvisual perception, they gathered data from children and adultsliving in Cambridge, Aberdeenshire, and Girton (a village nearCambridge). Immense care was taken to describe the envi-ronment in which the experiments were done in both Britainand the Torres Strait Islands and to acknowledge when com-parisons were not possible. Smell was the most difficult sen-sory mode because in Murray Island [Torres Strait] every-thing seemed to have a smell (Haddon et al. 1901:177).Hence, no odorless substance was available to serve as a con-trol.

Second, despite their desire for careful recording of theexperimental setting, they were remarkably able to toleratelack of accuracy: they frequently acknowledged rough ac-curacy, having no pretense to extreme accuracy, willingnessto sacrifice greater accuracy, and the impossibility of identi-fying aberrant reaction times (Haddon et al. 1901:209). Butthey asserted that, even so, their results had significance andtheir experiments were very far from being unprofitable(Haddon et al. 1901:209).

Third, and particularly prescient, looking back from pres-ent-day anthropology, was their concern to collect materials



in their ordinary, everyday settings. In Notes and Queries of1912, they summarized a compendium of what was learnedin the Cambridge Expedition.

A not infrequent feature of anthropological work . . . is very

puzzling. It often happens that you ask for information in

a way which seems to you to be perfectly simple and straight-

forward, and your informant may be quite unable to re-

spond, and yet later, sometimes within half an hour, he will

give what you want incidentally, perhaps in the course of a

tale or other narrative. Probably the formal question, framed

on some category of European thought, put the matter in

an unaccustomed light. In order to grasp its meaning it

would have been necessary for your informant to see the

matter in a light different from that natural to the people,

but when telling the tale the facts are in their natural setting

and rise to consciousness spontaneously. (Freire-Marreco

and Myres 1912:111)

I will return to the importance of finding information in itsordinary, everyday setting below.

C. S. Myers and Ludwig Wittgenstein

C. S. Myers took the Cambridge Expedition approach somesteps farther.5 His studies in the Torres Strait Islands and laterin the Cambridge Laboratory of Experimental Psychology(after 1912) focused on aural perception in music and rhythm(Freire-Marreco and Myres 1912). He founded the psycho-logical laboratory at Cambridge in 1912, taught experimentalpsychology, and authored a two-volume textbook on the sub-ject. He was interested not only in recording music, measuringits intervals, and measuring reaction times in various sensorymodalities but specifically in the subjective components ofsensory experience. So, for example, using a Wundtian ap-paratus in Cambridge, he could present subjects with soundsseparated by various intervals (Myers 1909:96). The subjectwould try to replicate the pattern, and these patterns wouldbe recorded on the smoked surface of a revolving drum. Thesubject should carefully record the results of introspectiveanalysis (Myers 1909:97). Metronomes were also used: Thesubject should observe and record the varying affective values(pleasant, wearisome, etc.) of different rhythms and the as-sociated experiences which they may revive (Myers 1909:99).An objective accentuation could be added by enclosing themetronome in a box, which could, unbeknownst to the sub-ject, be opened or closed. The point of the experiments wasto identify the conditions under which subjects heard orread into a sequence of beats a rhythm which was not in factthere (McGuinness 1988:127).

Throughout his career and well into the 1930s, Myersstressed that the aesthetic aspects of music and rhythm hadto be understood comparatively in different cultures (Myers

5. Myers trained in medicine. He went in this capacity to the TorresStrait Islands and worked there with Rivers, who also trained in medicine.

1937:63). In The Ethnological Study of Music, he sum-marizes:

Thus it comes about that many examples of primitive music

are incomprehensible to us, just because they are not so

readily assimilated as those which are more nearly related

to our previous experiences. Our attention is continuously

distracted, now by the strange features and changes of

rhythm, now by the extraordinary colouring of strange in-

struments, now by the unwonted progression and character

of intervals. Consequently much familiarity is needed before

we can regard such music from a standpoint that will allow

of faithful description. We have first to disregard our well-

trained feelings towards consonances and dissonances. We

have next to banish to the margins of our field of con-

sciousness certain aspects of music, which, were it our own

music, would occupy the very focus of attention. Thus in-

comprehensibility will gradually give place to meaning, and

dislike to some interesting emotion. (Myers 1907:249)

The crucial point is that Myers was interested in the physicalworld (how people perceived sound with their ears), but heheld that the social and cultural world would determine howpeoples perceptions were experienced. In his writing on mu-sic after the Cambridge Expedition, Myers may have evengone a step beyond the expeditions original extension of theWundtian experimental method. The expedition extendedWundts concepts of the generalized mind and of introspectivetraining: Myers may have been moving toward a method thatwas not experimental at all.

Another significant aspect of Myerss work was that heworked for a time with Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge.Wittgenstein was a student at the University of Cambridgereading moral science, and at the time, moral science includedphilosophy and experimental psychology. In his later writings,turning away from the logical system he laid out in the Trac-tatus Logico-Philosophicus, Wittgenstein frequently referred toanthropological facts and anthropological phenomena.He articulated some of the central tenets of anthropologicalanalysis; here, he restates Notes and Queries on the everyday,natural setting: What we are supplying are really remarks onthe natural history of human beings; we are not contributingcuriosities however, but observations which no one hasdoubted, but which have escaped remark only because theyare always before our eyes (Wittgenstein 1953:415).

My argument up to this point is that the members of theCambridge Expedition took the elements of the Wundt lab-oratory that placed introspection and intentional action atthe center of human psychological experience and ran withthem.6 They devised a remarkable way of looking at humanpsychology as inextricably embedded in its context, rightdown to the bottom. Even the most raw, natural perceptualinputs from eyes, ears, nose, and skin were only graspable as

6. I am deliberately emphasizing those elements of their work thatexceeded the experimental model. For another view, see Schaffer (1994).



products of specific human social environments. As we willsee in the following section, many other descendants of earlyexperimental psychology have come to see things otherwise.Enamored of what seem to be new reservoirs of potentialitywith creativity and free play unleashed, affect theorists depictthe social as stopping well before we get down to the bottom.Language, meaning, and cognition are separated from theaffects by a gap. After describing the landscape of affecttheory, I will return for an alternative view to Wittgensteinand the legacy of the Cambridge Expedition.

The Move Away from the Social

Wittgensteins thought looped back to the Cambridge Ex-peditions sensibilities after his excursion in the logical fieldsof the Tractatus. Experimental psychology, meanwhile, trod asingle-minded path for the most part into models thatstripped the human subject of subjectivity. Perhaps sparkedby James Cattells innovation of the lip key, there was a pro-gressive elimination of the experience of subjects from psy-chology. Kurt Danziger has pointed out that where the efforthas been made to reintroduce subjectivity, the refusal has beenabsolutely relentless. It became a key principle of the dom-inant model of psychological experimentation that the sub-jects experience was to be discounted. Attempts to changethis state of affairs have always evolved the most determinedresistance (Danziger 1990:183).

The story of how this happened is a far longer one than Ican tell here, including, in recent years, a growing rapproche-ment between experimental psychology and neuroscientificimaging technologies. Here, in order to follow the theme ofpotentiality, I will develop a case study of the ally of neuro-scientific thinking I mentioned earlier, affect theory, which isbeing used in the humanities to explain phenomena on onescale (e.g., those embodied in social relationships, places, prac-tices, and institutions that have a material existence apart fromthe brain) by means of phenomena on another scale (thoseembodied in the brain).

Affect Theory

Many scholars in the humanities have recently engaged withresearch in neuroscience to posit a view of a precognitive,preindividual stage of human perception that promises un-realized dimensions of potentiality. Here are some descrip-tions of affect in the words of two theorists from quite dif-ferent disciplines.

Nigel Thrift, a geographer, writes,

In this paper I want to think about affect in cities and about

affective cities . . . and, above all, about what the political

consequences of thinking more explicitly about these topics

might beonce it is accepted that the political decision is

itself produced by a series of inhuman or pre-subjective

forces and intensities. (Thrift 2004:58)

Eric Shouse, a cultural critic, states,

An affect is a non-conscious experience of intensity; it is a

moment of unformed and unstructured potential. . . . Affect

is always prior to and/or outside of consciousness. (Shouse

2005)

There are a number of importantly different varieties ofaffect theory. Some are indebted to Silvan Tomkinss (2008)writing and others to Francisco Varelas work on open sys-tems, often in the style of Deleuze and Guatarri (1987; Varela1999). But taking into account their differences, historianRuth Leys (2011) summarizes some of the main assumptionsthey hold in common: For the theorists in question, affectsare inhuman, pre-subjective, visceral forces and intensitiesthat influence our thinking and judgments but are separatefrom these. Whatever else may be meant by the terms affectand emotion . . . the affects must be non-cognitive, corporealprocesses or states (437).7 For such theorists, affect is, asBrian Massumi (2002) asserts, irreducibly bodily and au-tonomic (28). Other enthusiastic contributors to affect the-ory from a wide range of fields, include Eve Sedgwick, PatriciaClough, Lauren Berlant, Elizabeth Grosz, Rosie Braidotti,Kathleen Stewart, Lawrence Grossberg, Elizabeth Wilson, andAntonio Damasio.8

This work relates directly to the theme of potentiality. Mas-sumi, one of the most widely read writers on affect theory,stresses its connection with potential in a chapter calledAutonomy of Affect.

Something that happens too quickly to have happened, ac-

tually, is virtual. The body is as immediately virtual as it is

actual. The virtual, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and

tendencies, is a realm of potential. In potential is where

futurity combines, unmediated, with pastness, where out-

sides are infolded and sadness is happy (happy because the

press to action and expression is life). (Massumi 2002:30

31; italics in original)

The definition Massumi gives to the concept of potential hereseems to be unlimited. In particular, the affective realm isnot limited by what he sees as the constraints of sociolinguisticmeaning. What motivates these scholars? They do not all agreeon every point, and I will be glossing over their differenceshere, but Leys identifies some common motivations. Cen-trally, they claim that the role of reason and rationality inpolitics, ethics, and aesthetics has been overvalued. It is toodisembodied and unlayered an account of the way peopleactually form opinions (Leys 2011:436). Given this, they adoptthe position that humans are corporeal creatures with im-portant subliminal affective intensities and resonances thatare decisive in the way we form opinions and beliefs. Theyshare an insistence that we ignore affects at our peril because

7. See this astute overview of commonalities and differences amongaffect theorists (Blackman and Venn 2010).

8. See, e.g., the papers in Gregg and Seigworth (2010) or Clough andHalley (2007).



they can be manipulated deliberately and because they containthe potential for creativity and transformation.

In sum, the affects are independent of and before language.They are before intentions, meanings, reasons, and beliefs;they are non-signifying, autonomic processes that take placebelow the level of conscious awareness and meaning; theyare inhuman, pre-subjective, visceral forces that influenceour thinking and judgments even though they are noncog-nitive and corporeal (Leys 2011:437, 443). Among the affects,at the physiological level, categories that are cognitively sep-arate (such as sad or pleasant) get connected, and this is oneway the affects are thought to open up new and creativepotential (Massumi 2002:29). Massumifollowing De-leuzeconsiders that the affects are characterized by inten-sity rather than content. Affective states, characterized byintensity, are nonsemantic, nonlinear, autonomous, vital, sin-gular, indeterminate, and disruptive of fixed (conventional)meanings. Hence the affects provide a rich reservoir of un-predictable potentiality.

All this means there is a gap between the signifying order(content, meaning, convention) and the affective order. Whatexactly is the gap? According to Leys (2011), there is a con-stitutive disjunction between our emotions on the one handand our knowledge of what causes and maintains them onthe other, because . . . affect and cognition are two separatesystems (437). These theorists generally argue that affect isindependent of meaning and signification; they deny the roleof intentionality and meaning at the affective level (Leys 2011:450). There is a gap or radical dichotomy between the realcauses of affect and the individuals own interpretation ofthese causes (Tomkins, quoted in Leys 2011:437). In Tom-kinss view, affects are phylogenetically old, automatic re-sponses of the organism that have evolved for survival pur-poses and lack the cognitive characteristics of the higher-ordermental processes and are separate from them (Leys 2011:437). The affects are located subcortically in the brain, in thepart of the brain that processes universal, natural kinds (suchas the so-called basic emotions). The basic emotions oraffect programs are genetically hardwired responses, prod-ucts of human evolution, that are expressed in autonomicbehavioral patterns (such as characteristic facial expressionsfor fear or disgust) (Damasio 1994; Leys 2011:438439; Sedg-wick 2003).

There is one part of affect theory that relates directly tothe theme of potentiality. This is the supposition that thereis no way to include both mind and body in an account ofmeaning, making it necessary to posit a level below the gapwhere bodily aspects of affect go on; it is the unformed, pre-cognitive aspects of the lower level of the affects that makethem seem filled with potential. This move separates inten-tionality or meaning from affect and assumes that intention-ality and meaning are purely mental or cognitive.

There are many points at which this argument can be crit-

icized.9 Some critics have shown in detail how the psycho-logical evidence that is the basis for the tenets of affect theoryis questionable and out of date (Leys 2010). Others havedetailed the ways affect theorists sometimes misread biologicaland psychological research (Papoulias and Callard 2010). Forexample, in a 1985 experiment by Benjamin Libet, subjectswere asked to decide to flex a finger at will and to note theexact time they made the decision. The experimenters alsomeasured the exact time of any rise in the subjects brainactivity and the exact time of the subjects finger flexing. Theresults showed that there was a 0.2-second delay between thebrains activity spike and the subjects decision, then a 0.3-second delay between the subjects decision and his fingerflexing. In all, there seemed to be a half-second delay betweenthe subjects brains initial activity and the subjects fingeractually flexing (Libet 1985). This half-second gap providesMassumi (2002:29) with the evidence of a gap between(lower) brain activity and (higher) decision, intentionality andaction. He concludes that material processes of the brain gen-erate our thoughts; conscious thoughts, decisions, and inten-tions come too late to be very significant. At most they arereflections after the fact. No one would doubt that the brainis necessary for thought and action. But Massumi and otheraffect theorists place too much weight on this experimentalevidence. Other studies have shown that Libets evidence isopen to contrary interpretations from its publication in 1985up until the present (Banks and Isham 2009, 2010; Gomes1998). At the very least, before drawing such far-reachingconclusions, one would hope scholars of cultural phenomenawould consider the experimental structures that generate psy-chological data. As I noted earlier, the psychological subjectbecomes a particular kind of stripped down entity, a data-emitting being whose subjective experience is outside theframe of the experiment. Perhaps this is not the most adequatemodel for understanding human intentionality.

The mistakes and confusions in this position are laid bareby the approach pioneered in the Cambridge Expedition andlater pursued in Wittgensteins account of intention, remem-bering, and other psychological terms. That account arguesthat our criteria for whether they have happened are nor-mative and conventional. These criteria are located in use,not in the interior psyche. Saying that criteria for meaningare normative and conventional does not mean that everyonemust agree, that there is harmony, or that there is not conflictor change. It means that criteria for meaning cannot arisefrom the mind of a single, isolated individual or from a prim-itive part of the brain. Drawing on Wittgenstein, ElizabethAnscombe argued for a social account of intentional actions.Anscombe was arguing against the common-sense view of anintention as composed of an action plus an interior mental

9. The point is too tangential to elaborate here, but I would add thatthe theory involves a troubling alliance with neuroscientific findingsrather than a critique of the pervasive cultural effects of neuroscientificfindings.



state. Looking at the ways we speak of an action as doneintentionally, she concluded that intention in everydaylanguage means something done as an action of a whole per-son, a moral agent, under a description. The relevant de-scription would include the past and present social contextsrelevant to the person as much as his or her interior states(Anscombe 1957).

What is at stake is whether we understand intentional hu-man action as gaining its meaning in an interior, hidden, andthus socially inaccessible space instead of in the light of socialexperience. Anscombe worked in a Wittgensteinian mode tomove intentionality away from the private interiority of themind into the space of social interaction, where meaning inlanguage is constituted. Wittgenstein conveyed this messagethrough many homely examples:

I tell someone: Im going to whistle you the theme . . .

It is my intention to whistle it, and I already know what I

am going to whistle. It is my intention to whistle this theme:

have I then already, in some sense, whistled it in thought?

(Wittgenstein 1967:2e)

One would like to ask: Would someone who could look

into your mind have been able to see that you meant to say

that? Suppose I had written my intention down on a slip

of paper, then someone else could have read it there. And

can I imagine that he might in some way have found it out

more surely than that? Certainly not. (Wittgenstein 1967:8e;

italics in original)

The point is that intentionality emerges from the whole struc-ture of events from the inception of the notion to the exe-cution of the action. We decide whether someone had a cer-tain intention not by referring to an event or template in themind but by whether his or her gestures, postures, words,and actions fit with a socially defined notion of being aboutto whistle a tune or meaning to say something. Sometimes amental event (whistling the tune or saying the words in oneshead) might precede the action and sometimes not, but inany case, that interior event could not constitute a usablecriterion for whether someone was intending to whistle ormeaning to speak.

Removing any interest in intentionalityconceived as asocial process, as affect theory doesremoves socially pro-duced contexts of use as a necessary and sufficient basis forwhat actions and words mean to people. Tackling mathe-matics, the realm of symbolic life perhaps most difficult toregard as contingent on social norms, Wittgenstein com-mented that people found the idea that numbers rested onconventional social understandings unbearable (Rhees1970). Why is there resistance to allowing the meaning ofhuman acts to rest on social understandings all the way down?Why such an idea is unbearable returns us to the CambridgeExpedition. Rivers and the others thought that plunging intoa different social and physical environment would make themdifferent people, comparable in many ways to the islanders.

In this view there is a vast reservoir of potential for changeand creative adaption. But this view also entails that there arelimits to human experience set by whatever social contextsare relevant. It does not compare with Massumis (2002) vir-tual realm, the pressing crowd of incipiencies and tenden-cies (30). Perhaps it is any limitation that seems unbearablein the present era, where the drumbeat of the necessity forconstant growth is heard and felt everywhere.

Saying that social context limits what is relevant does notclose off experiences that are unconscious, inchoate, or un-speakable. Anthropologists and sociolinguists have long foundways to address the entirely social meanings of things that arerepressed from speech or action but nonetheless contain pow-erful kinds of potentiality.

Years ago Gayle Rubin (1975) analyzed the sex/gendersystem as a set of arrangements by which a society trans-forms biological sexuality into products of human activity(159). More recently, in Brainstorm, Jordan-Young (2010) re-phrases this: Gender . . . is a social effect, rather than theresult of human biology. Sex in this regard is conceived asthe remainderthe material body, and those bodily inter-actions that are necessary to reproduce it (13). Borrowingfrom this way of putting it, we could say that like the sex/gender system, the affect/intentionality system is a set of ar-rangements by which a society transforms neurological pro-cesses into products of human activity. Affects are a socialeffect rather than the result of human biology. Intentions inthis regard are conceived as the remainderthe material brainand those neurological interactions that are necessary to re-produce it.

Looked at this way, what we see as the affects are the prod-uct of a social process that has separated them from largercontexts rather than a new entity we have discovered in na-ture. The feminist concerns that motivate Rubin are relevantto analysis in terms of the affects. We need to ask whetherone result of seeing the affects as biological phenomena islosing the insights that feminism can provide.10

Potentiality

It is clear that the trait of potentiality is sometimes thrownup as an object of desire because it seems to imply creativity,openness, and infinite possibility unconstrained by social con-ventions. I want to suggest that in the ethnographic methodlies another kind of potentiality: the potential to examine theontological position that comparison between two socialworlds opens up. One key to what is unique about the eth-nographic move is that it allows us to see an ordinary, ev-eryday, natural setting in its context but from a certain pointof view. Wittgenstein muses,

Lets imagine a theatre, the curtain goes up and we see

someone alone in his room walking up and down, lighting

a cigarette, seating himself etc. so that suddenly we are ob-

10. A particularly useful reminder is Lutz (1995).



serving a human being from outside in a way that ordinarily

we can never observe ourselves; as if we were watching a

chapter from a biography with our own eyes,surely this

would be at once uncanny and wonderful. More wonderful

than anything a playwright could cause to be acted or spoken

on the stage. We should be seeing life itself.But then we

do see this every day and it makes not the slightest im-

pression on us! True enough, but we do not see it from that

point of view. (Wittgenstein 1984:4e)

It is obvious that the theater creates its own context, but theplaywright/artist/ethnographer allows us to view that contextfrom a certain point of view, namely, from the point of viewof another embedded context: we can adopt the way ofthought which as it were flies above the world and leaves itthe way it is, contemplating it from above in its flight (Witt-genstein 1984:5e).11

In Culture and Value, Wittgenstein (1984) wrote of theethnological point of view and said that this point of viewallows us to take up a standpoint right outside so as to beable to see things more objectively (37e).12 What could hepossibly have meant by more objectively, given his insis-tence that there is no external point, outside the immersionin everyday forms of life, from which those forms of life canbe understood? I think more objectively means from a com-parative point of view. Comparing two contexts means de-scribing their differencesit does not mean placing them onthe same scale. Recall Myerss remarks on music: the eth-nographic goal in understanding unfamiliar music is to ban-ish to the margins our habitual focus of attention and makethe incomprehensible meaningful through faithful descrip-tion.

Editor and biographer Rush Rhees (1970) wrote that whatWittgenstein called the anthropological point of view hadoften been misunderstood. He cited a comment of Wittgen-steins about language games: The advantage of looking atlanguage games is that they let us look step by step at whatwe otherwise could only see as a tangled ball of yarn (Rhees1970:50; my translation). Wittgenstein warned against thecraving for generality as the real source of metaphysics. Headded, Instead of craving for generality I could also havesaid the contemptuous attitude towards the particular case(Rhees 1970:51). Ethnography could be said to be about par-ticular cases set alongside one another but not balled up intoone another. Two tangled balls of yarn can look very muchthe same; only when we look at them step by step (untanglingthe ball of yarn) can we gather the details that make a contextspecific, not general. Perhaps we could say that affect theoristscrave generality.

Is the widespread contempt for the particular case todaypart of what drives the search for universal neural processes

11. Thanks to Michael Fried for his interesting discussion of this point(Fried 2008).

12. Dass wir unsern Standpunkt weit draussen einnehmen, um dieDinge objectiver sehen zu konnen.

that generate the affects? Have the affects been discovered?Or are they an effect of social processes that have worked tomake them materialize? Is contempt for the particular con-tempt for anything that limits the kind of commensurabilitythat our markets and systems of governance demand?

Conclusion

My interest is piqued by the ways Wittgenstein opens up totheorize what kind of knowledge ethnography is. After myearly surprise while being a subject in a lab that was studyingemotions while disregarding my emotions, I have found anumber of labs in which I can observe and participate, labswhose members are interested in the history of introspectionin psychology, for example, the work of Robert S. Woodworth,who continued Wundts introspective methods and questions(against the grain) into the 1930s. It would be a nice ironyif the practices of Rivers and the other Torres Strait research-ers, indebted as they were to experimental psychology, couldclarify both what is important about ethnographic fieldworkand why some contemporary psychologists are now beginningto return to questions involving intention and introspection.Although Cattells lip key opened a path to removing intro-spection, the historical record of earlier experiments that re-lied on introspective reports is extremely rich. A shared in-terest in this history is what opened laboratory doors to me.

If some experimental psychologists are becoming interestedin the role intentionality plays in their experiments, why aresome humanities scholars trying to rule out intentionalityfrom the literature, art, and media they study? Whatever thereasons, it seems clear that to counteract the appeal of affecttheory and its notion of potentiality, we will need robustethnographic accounts that are specific about how humansperceptions are social all the way down. Our history in theTorres Strait guides us toward a limited and socially con-strained but creative notion of potentiality.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the spring 2011 seminar in the anthropology ofscience at New York University for discussions of affect theoryand to Max Black, Georg von Wright, Norman Malcolm, andBruce Goldstein in the philosophy department at Cornell Uni-versity for their lectures and discussions on Wittgenstein whenI was in graduate school there. I also appreciate help with thehistorical sources from John Forrester, Alison Winter, MichaelSokal, David Robinson, and Christopher Green. Most pro-found thanks to all of the members and organizers of theWenner-Gren symposium on potentiality and to the anony-mous reviewers.

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