paranoid critiques, reparative reductions: leys, …

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PARANOID CRITIQUES, REPARATIVE REDUCTIONS: LEYS, SEDGWICK, AND THE PRODUCTIVE OPACITY OF AFFECT

Abraham Geil

Paranoia knows some things well and others poorly. —Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick 1

In the fictional small town of Santa Mira, California, Dr. Miles Bennell is hearing bizarre complaints from his local patients. My uncle’s not my

uncle. My mother’s not my mother. My husband’s not my husband. The first of these patients, the “tough-minded” thirty-something Wilma, calm-ly explains to Miles that her Uncle Ira, who raised her from infancy, “‘looks, sounds, acts, and remembers exactly like Ira. On the outside. But inside he’s different. His responses … aren’t emotionally right.’”2 Miles soon discovers that the townspeople are not suffering from some contagious paranoid delusion. Their intimates have in fact been replaced by alien spores, vegetal parasites capable of duplicating the cells of their sleeping human hosts, retaining every memory and mannerism, before abandoning the original bodies to collapse in a pile of fluff.

As Jack Finney likely knew when he serialized the first version of “The Body Snatchers” in Colliers magazine in 1954, the symptoms afflicting his char-acters perfectly fit the diagnosis for an actual condition identified three decades earlier. Capgras syndrome, first described in France in 1923 as l’illusion des sosies, is the name for a rare neurological disorder in which the patient has the delu-sion that an intimate—typically a spouse, parent, child, or friend (sometimes even a pet)—has been replaced by an identical-looking imposter.3 Originally diagnosed in a psychoanalytic framework, Capgras syndrome is now typically explained in organic terms as the result of a functional disconnect in neuro-anatomy. In short, the prevailing hypothesis is that a disruption occurs in the normal feedback circuit between the visual centers of the brain responsible for processing faces and the emotional centers in the limbic system. Consequently, this theory goes, when a Capgras patient sees a loved one she or he recognizes the person but experiences none of the emotion that usually attends that rec-ognition. The delusion of a replicant imposter then arises as the most logical, if improbable, way to resolve this discrepancy.

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For neuroscientists, the primary yield of studying rare and exotic dis-orders like Capgras syndrome lies in what they can reveal about “normal” (neurotypical) brain function. As a cultural heuristic, pathology can also reveal normality—as itself pathological. Consider the allegorical fecundity of the “pod people” from Finney’s story to its first adaption in Don Sie-gel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956) and across the three subsequent remakes in 1978, 1993, and 2007, respectively. As J. Hoberman points out, the original story and film adaption, with their postwar American context, were politically ambivalent. Available for both right and left readings, the allegory was alternatively about communist infiltration or small-town con-formism.4

What makes the figure of the “pod people” intriguing is not so much any particular allegorical reading than the way it serves what Fredric James-on describes (in referring to the overdetermined symbolism of the shark in his famous analysis of Jaws) as an “essentially polysemous function.”5 How is it that the “pod people” in Body Snatchers can, like the great white shark, serve as an allegorical container for any number of different cultural anxieties? Jameson’s argument about the interpretive focus on the symbol of the shark in Jaws is that it was ultimately a critical dead-end because such interpretations could only mimic the film’s own ideological operation, which was to displace properly social antagonisms of class onto a natural-ized conflict between humanity and “other forms of biological existence.”6 What I want to suggest here, however, is the possibility for something like an inversion of Jameson’s exemplary maneuver of ideology critique. Rath-er than reading Capgras syndrome, in this case, as naturalizing the social anxiety and paranoia invoked by the figure of the “pod people”—that is, as an ideological containment strategy—we might instead ask how it can function qua reduction as an engine for generating a multiplicity of social allegories. How, in other words, does the specific form of this neurobio-logical reduction—the dissociation between (re)cognition and affect in the brain—enable the proliferation of meaning rather than its deflation?

This question opens onto the broader disciplinary issue of the relation between the critical humanities and the biological sciences (neuroscience most saliently) today. Ruth Leys, a prominent historian of science, has devoted much of her work to critically probing that relation in the geneal-ogies she traces of trauma, guilt, and, most recently, affect from the second half of the twentieth century to the present. In a series of articles published

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over the past decade Ruth Leys has pressed the case for a strong affinity between the prevailing view of affect in cultural theory and the account that dominates in the neuroscientific research on emotion.7 For all their differences, she argues, what the affect theorists and neuroscientists share at bottom is the false assumption that affect is essentially independent of cognition. I will return to “The Body Snatchers” in the conclusion of this essay, but for now I would simply note the resemblance between Leys’s diagnosis of the so-called “turn to affect” and the explanation for Capgras syndrome. In Leys’s account, it is as if the “anti-intentionalist” affect the-orists have willingly imposed a variation of Capgras upon their own dis-course by severing affect from cognition, adopting as their conception of (normal) affect what is in actuality a pathological dissociation. In so doing, she argues, they unwittingly cut themselves off from the capacity to engage in meaningful argument concerning intention, belief, and ideology. With this latter part of her argument, we might say, the terms of the analogy shift. Here Leys’s affect theorists become like the “pod people” themselves, contentedly indifferent to the meaning they have lost, while paranoia at-taches exclusively to the side of her critique.

And paranoid, I want to suggest, is the term that best captures the substance as well as the style of Leys’s critique of the affective turn. That paranoia can name not only an individual pathology or a cultural mood but also an imperative mode of cultural theory was of course the starting point of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s now classic essay on affect and method: “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You.” This connection is not inci-dental. Sedgwick’s work—and specifically her interest in the affect theory of the American psychologist Silvan Tomkins—has long been a central target of Leys’s critique.8 But my aim in this article is not simply to turn the tables on Leys’s critique by using Sedgwick to diagnosis and dismiss it as merely a paranoid reading. As any reader of the “Paranoid Reading, Re-parative Reading” essay knows, there is nothing “mere” about paranoia for Sedgwick. To the contrary, Sedgwick expounds throughout the essay upon the critical power of paranoid reading as well as its limitations. More-over, while the paranoid imperative of demystification is a hallmark of the broader tendency in critical theory that Paul Ricoeur famously dubbed the “hermeneutics of suspicion,” paranoia also has its own distinctive history within queer theory—very much including Sedgwick’s own work, as she is


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quick to acknowledge. And although it is tempting to see “reparative read-ing” as the “good” term or antidote in her essay for the corrosive excesses of paranoid critical practice, she makes clear from the beginning that the problem she seeks to redress is the monopolistic control of the latter such that it had become co-extensive with “theory” in the critical humanities. What she calls for, then, is to dislodge paranoia from its hegemonic status by seeing it as “one kind of cognitive/affective theoretical practice among other, alternative kinds.”9 That is, as a “relational stance” or position, rather than an a priori identity for the knowing, politically-invested cultural the-orist.10

Hence, in “Paranoid Reading, Reparative Reading” Sedgwick calls for an approach capable of accommodating the oscillation or “interdigitation” between these two modes of critical practice. It is precisely this potential for oscillation, I argue, that is foreclosed in Leys’s formidable critique of affect theory. A number of authors have directly disputed aspects of that critique and Leys has been more than happy to engage them in (often heated) debate.11 My approach in this article is somewhat different. By first casting her critique in Sedgwick’s terms as a “paranoid” reading, I want to then consider the effects of pursuing something like a “reparative” beside it. To be clear, this is not meant as an attempt to supplement or nuance Leys’s argument. My aim, rather, is to apprehend the strength of her critique while directing it toward different ends. Though her polemic is leveled mostly at an analytical level, at key moments she makes the ethico-polit-ical stakes of her project clear. The consequence of the “radical separation of affect and reason,” she argues, is “to make disagreement about meaning, or ideological dispute, irrelevant to cultural analysis.”12 For Leys, the “turn to affect” has meant nothing less than a solipsistic turning away from the vocation of critical humanist inquiry.13 There is much in this sweeping al-legation worth contesting, but what I will attempt to call into question in this essay is the assumption that a materialist reduction of affect necessarily negates meaning and argument. The problem, I claim, is not reductionism as such but how one reads the reduction.

I.

First, allow me to flesh out my claim that Leys’s critique of affect the-ory consists of a paranoid reading. Again, following Sedgwick, the point

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is not to pathologize Leys’s project, but, rather, to clarify the sources of its impressive strength and scope while also tracing its limitations. Sedgwick’s analytic of paranoia also enables a certain distance on the many count-er-attacks that have been launced in response to Ley’s provocative essay “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” which set off one of the more rancorous debates in recent memory when it appeared in the pages of Critical Inqui-ry.14

Sedgwick identifies five key features that together provide a “compos-ite sketch” of paranoid practice. With respect to Leys’s critique, I will focus on three in particular:

Paranoia is reflexive and mimetic. Paranoia is a strong theory. Paranoia places its faith in exposure.15

The first of these is probably the most characteristic feature of a paranoid reading: the tendency to recursively mimic its object of knowledge. It takes a thief to catch a thief, as the saying goes; or, in Sedgwick’s queer inflection, “it takes one to know one.”16 Thus, paranoia is “drawn toward and tends to construct symmetrical relations, in particular, symmetrical epistemolo-gies.”17 Now, as I’ve already indicated, the crux of Leys’s argument is that a false picture has taken hold of and distorted research on affect in both neuroscience and the humanities. The fundamental error that gives rise to this picture, she argues, is an assumed but unsustainable—that is, theoret-ically incoherent and empirically flawed—separation between affect and cognition. That separation is predicated upon a reduction of affect to auto-nomic bodily responses below (and before) the threshold of conscious in-tention and meaning. Several of her critics have responded to this account by accusing Leys of circularity, of performing in advance the reductionism she then purports to expose. William Connolly, for example, argues that Leys’s critique depends upon positing an overly restrictive notion of in-tentionality in order to locate his and other aligned theories of affect in the “anti-intentionalist” camp.18 Adam Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson ar-gue that the very construction of “intentionalist” and “anti-intentionalist” camps is itself a reduction, and they gesture (rather darkly) towards the “stakes behind Leys’s insistence on a radical opposition between affect and intention … where there is none.”19 From the perspective of paranoid read-


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ing, however, these accusations of circularity are misapprehensions of its mimetic method—the fact, in this case, that it takes a reduction to know a reduction. Or, to be more precise, that for Leys it takes positing the (true) dualism of “intentionalist” and “anti-intentionalist” camps of affect theory in order to expose the (false) dualism of intention and affect that unites an otherwise heterogeneous collection of theorists under the latter camp.

If paranoia’s tendency toward mimetic reduction carries the risk of circularity (or at least the accusation of circularity), its conceptual economy also affords Leys’s critique tremendous strength in Sedgwick’s sense (bor-rowing from Tomkins) of a “strong theory.” The strength of a theory, in this understanding, lies in its “reach and reductiveness” and can be measured by the “size and topology of the domain that it organizes.”20 And the turn to affect in the humanities and social sciences is a large and variegated do-main indeed. It spans, in Leys’s count, the fields of history, political theory, human geography, urban and environmental studies, architecture, literary studies, art history, media theory, and cultural studies. Moreover, the span of her critique does not end there but, as I have already indicated, extends importantly into the life sciences, especially neuroscience. Central to Leys’s project is the argument that the turn to affect across the humanities uncrit-ically recruits evidence from a dominant strain in neuroscientific research on emotion that supports the anti-intentionalist position. Crucially, her claim is not that this constitutes an improper boundary crossing between the “two cultures,” but, rather, that a false picture of affect obtains on both sides of that divide. The key to her critique’s strength as a strongly paranoid theory is the contention that it is essentially the same false picture.

Unsurprisingly, a major motif in the critical responses to Leys’s “Turn To Affect” essay is that her argument flattens out important differenc-es among heterogeneous theorists and positions.21 As a “strong theory,” however, her critique at least partly preempts such criticisms by freely ad-mitting as much in advance. Leys is careful to stipulate that differences do exist among the various authors she labels as “anti-intentionalist” but that her project is not to emphasize such differences. For the purposes of a “strong theory,” attending too closely to nuances of difference saps the strength of the analytic and risks fragmentation of the domain it seeks to organize. That is partly what the contrast with a “weak theory” means for Tomkins: “To the extent to which the theory can account only for ‘near’ phenomena, it is a weak theory, little better than a description of the phe-

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nomena which it purports to explain. As it orders more and more remote phenomena to a single formulation, its power grows.”22

But importantly this is not just a difference of focal length, of the specificity or generality of the analytic perspective relative to its object. Trained as an historian of science, one of the most impressive aspects of Leys’s work is the precision with which she parses the experiments under her consideration. Detail is not wanting. Indeed, as Sedgwick observes, one of the surprising affordances of a “strong theory” is that the very broadness of its scope can open the space for close description, providing “shelter” to any number of “weak theories” within the expanse of its “hypertrophied embrace.”23 Whatever the local rewards of this attention to detail, however, the point is to accumulate material for constructing what (Foucault’s) Ni-etzsche calls the “cyclopean monuments” that structure genealogical histo-ries.24 Leys’s genealogy of affect consists in tracing the separate paths that cultural theory, on the one hand, and neuroscience, on the other, took to confirm the same presupposition of anti-intentionality. That these are dif-ferent paths to the same end is borne out for Leys by what she sees as the “natural affinity” affect theorists display for this strain in the neuroscience of emotion.25

The depth of that affinity reveals itself most clearly when it appears at a maximum distance from the avowed position of certain affect theorists who are consequently pulled, as if by the force of gravity, into performa-tive contradiction. She argues, for example, that the materialist account of affect favored by “Brian Massumi and many other cultural theorists [who] present themselves as Spinozists who oppose dualism in all of its guises” depends in fact upon the presupposition of a strict mind/body dualism.26 In this way, she seeks to demonstrate that these theorists’s commitment to the “anti-intentionalist” picture of affect is so strong that it persists even in the face of blatant incompatibility with their avowed philosophical ori-entations.

This brings us to the third feature in Sedgwick’s account of paranoid knowing: it puts its faith in exposure. In the “Turn to Affect” essay and elsewhere, Leys often signals the operation of exposure by using the phrase “at first sight…” to introduce an apparent incompatibility between two positions that she then resolves in the next clause or sentence by reveal-ing the deeper commonality that unites them. For example: “I propose that although at first sight the work of Tomkins—or Ekman, or Dama-


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sio—might appear to be too reductive for the purposes of those cultural theorists indebted to Deleuzean ideas about affect, there is in fact a deep coherence between the views of both groups.”27 In one sense, this “deep coherence” is what her project seeks to expose; it is the “cyclopean monu-ment” at the heart of her genealogy of affect from the second half of the 20th century to the present. But Leys’s motivation for constructing this genealogy in the first place is her strong conviction that this coherence is grounded in a false understanding of affect. Exposing its falsity involves a double operation: it requires demonstrating various forms of incoherence (e.g. performative contradiction) on the part of the cultural theorists; and demonstrating flaws in the empirical-experimental evidence on the part of the neuroscientists. The “faith” implicit in this exposure is that it will render the anti-intentionalist approach to affect unsustainable for both cultural theory and scientific practice.

There is one site of exposure that Leys returns to almost obsessively: the paradigm in scientific research on emotion that she identifies as the “Basic Emotions View.” Developed and promoted most prominently by the American psychologist Paul Ekman, this paradigm has been a consis-tent target of critique for Leys since at least From Guilt to Shame (2007).28 According to Leys, the “Basic Emotions View” has its origins in Silvan Tomkins’s positing of eight (and later nine) primary affects—interest, sur-prise, joy, anger, fear, distress, disgust, shame, and dissmell (or contempt)—which are, in Leys’s gloss, taken to be “rapid, phylogenetically old, auto-matic responses of the organism that have evolved for survival purposes and lack the cognitive characteristics of the higher-order mental process-es.”29 This evolutionary, categorical approach to affects as “natural kinds” lent itself to Paul Ekman’s subsequent development of a “neurocultural” model of emotion in which facial displays are understood to be univer-sally legible “read-outs” of basic emotions. In order to test this hypothesis, Ekman and his colleagues conducted a series of cross-cultural judgment studies in which they purported to show that a set of photographs repre-senting the expression of these basic emotions were reliably and universally recognized. In 1976, Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen published Pictures of Facial Affect which provided black and white photographs of posed hu-man expressions that they claimed to be representational prototypes of six affect categories.30 If in Leys’s account the “anti-cognitive” position de-pends upon the materialist reduction of affect to non-conscious corporeal

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response, Ekman’s set of prototypical expressions literalizes this error by reducing the representation of affect to the material surface of an image. What Leys ultimately exposes in this reduction—and the reason it is so significant for her entire critique—is a false transparency.

I will return to Leys’s critique of Ekman’s “Basic Emotions View,” and specifically its use in experimental settings, but for the moment I want to note that for Leys this false transparency is more than just an epistemo-logical problem. Insofar as it is recruited as empirical evidence in the hu-manities it becomes an ethico-political problem as well. For Leys, the false transparency of this picture of affect comes to underwrite opacity (con-strued as blockage) at the level of meaning. Responding to the perceived allegation that she is adopting the position of a reactionary humanist resis-tant to the intrusions of science, Leys insists that what she opposes is just “bad science,” by which she means the “false reductionism” of Ekman et. al.31 She therefore valorizes those scientists who, in opposition to Ekman, adopt the “intentionalist” (or “appraisal theorist”) position by recognizing that the study of affect demands methods characterized by the intensifica-tion of complexity rather than its reduction. In other words, affect requires the sort of “thick descriptions” which are “familiar to anthropologists and novelists but are widely thought to be inimical to science.”32 The corollary to this argument is that, by appropriating the reductionism of this “bad science” to support their theories of affect, humanists and social scientists eschew the hermeneutic tools proper to their vocation and indispensable to understanding the irreducibly social meanings of affect.

II.

Leys’s “paranoid” reading of affect theory is, for reasons we have just seen, difficult to refute on its own terms. Indeed, the strength of a strong theory lies not least in its ability to determine in advance the conceptual terrain on which it can be contested. The objection of many of her critics that the theorists she attacks are more nuanced or complex than she allows already accepts the premise that reductionism is above all the trap any self-respect-ing account of affect must avoid. In a rhetorical formulation that parallels the passage about Deleuze-inspired theorists I quote above, Leys remarks in an interview that:


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At first sight it is tempting to assume that … the views of psychologist Paul Ekman about the existence of six, or seven, or eight basic emotions hardwired in the brain and functioning automatically without regard to the meaning such feelings have for the organism, are too reductive for the purposes of postmodernist cultural theorists as sophisticated, say, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. [my emphasis]33

As was the case with the Deleuzeans in the previous passage, the initial ap-pearance of incompatibility is but a prelude to the revelation of a “deep co-herence.” Nevertheless, I want to linger for a moment on what is presumed in this rhetorical first glance. Leaving aside whatever assumptions might be signaled here by Leys’s use of the broad, by now almost quaint epithet, “postmodernist cultural theorist,” leaving aside for the moment even Leys’s collapse of Tomkins into Ekman34 (Sedgwick makes no reference to Ek-man, as far as I know), what interests me about this remark is how it rele-gates the status of reduction to the antimony of sophistication. Leys’s point is that Sedgwick is attracted to Ekman’s (but actually Tomkin’s) categorical account of affect despite its reductiveness because it confirms and enables her own anti-intentionalist position. Reductionism, on this view, is either a price to pay or a sin to repress; either way, it is not taken as productive of its own autonomous value.

It is worth recalling here that Sedgwick (together with Adam Frank) addressed the resistance within cultural theory to just the sort of biological reduction involved in Tomkins’s theory of primary affects. “You don’t have to be long out of theory kindergarten,” as they memorably put it, “to make mincemeat of … a psychology that depends on the separate existence of eight (only sometimes it’s nine) distinct affects hardwired into the human biological system.”35 Written in the mid-1990s, these lines were addressed to what they call the “automatic antibiologism” in contemporary theory, a near-consensus that biological explanations of any aspect of human be-havior and culture are necessarily antithetical to the values of difference, contingency, and change.36 Roughly two decades on, it is fair to say that this taboo on the biological no longer carries that same force. Leys de-scribes this shift in terms of cultural theorists seeking to “recast biology in dynamic, energistic, nondeterministic terms that emphasize its unpredict-able and potentially emancipatory qualities” in the “hope” of avoiding “the charge of falling into crude reductionism.”37 This singularly ungenerous

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interpretation, which reads bad faith into recent attempts on the part of critical humanists to construct an encounter with biology, has those theo-rists ensnared yet again in performative contradiction, committing them-selves all the more fully to reductionism through their own facile attempts to disavow it.

What interests me here is not whether Leys succeeds in making this charge of reductionism stick. Instead, I want to follow Sedgwick and Frank’s reading of Tomkins in considering the value of what is obscured by this charge. For them, such consideration first required suspending the common sense of theory’s anti-biologism in order to make the force of Tomkins’s thought available to their moment. Although not the idiom Sedgwick and Frank use in this context, we can easily translate this as the effort to suspend the paranoid mode of “discrediting questions” in order to pose the reparative question: “What was it possible to think or do at a certain moment of the past that is no longer is?” With respect to Tomkins’s affect theory this meant asking what it was possible for him to think in his moment of early cybernetics and systems theory. Among other things, it was possible to think difference and differentiation as occupying the “realm of finitely many (n>2) values.”38 Arguing that “the conceptual space between 2 and infinity” had been effectively “evacuated,” they suggest that “it’s hard to hold on to the concept of eight or thirteen (and yet not in-finite) different kinds of—anything important without having a biological model somewhere in the vicinity.”39

If the prevailing anti-biologism of Sedgwick and Frank’s theoretical moment blocked the ability to think difference within this realm of the “fi-nitely many (n>2),” and if that moment has now in some sense passed, we could say that Leys’s critique resumes that work of blockage with some-what different means and in the service of an explicitly anti-identitarian politics. In other words, we might put it that Leys’s “paranoid” critique of affect theory seeks to (re)evacuate the “conceptual space between 2 and in-finity” by forcing a choice between only two options. In thinking affect, one commits to either: (a) intentionalism, which leads to the “good” infinity of thick description, contestable interpretation, and meaning; or (b) anti-in-tentionalism, which leads to the “bad” infinity of autonomic response, un-contestable individual differences, and solipsism. Whereas the whole point of Sedgwick and Frank trying to conceptualize the possibility of “finitely many (>2) values” was precisely that it offered the potential for a “politi-


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cal vision of difference that might resist both binary homogenization and infinitizing trivialization.”40 Their idiosyncratic turn to Tomkins and his theory of 8 (or 9) basic affects thus offered a means to think their way out of what they regarded as a fundamental impasse in their theoretical and political moment. Leys’s charge of reductionism claims, in effect, that this investment in Tomkins’s theory of affect simply condemns Sedgwick and Frank to another version of the “infinitizing trivialization” they sought to escape. Indeed, “infinitizing trivialization” would not be a bad term for the diagnosis Leys and Walter Benn Michaels issue for contemporary cultural theory and its purported displacement of interpretation and disagreement by subject position and difference.

Everything turns here on how one reads the sort of reduction involved in positing a finite set of basic affects. As I argue above, Leys reads this reduction in terms of a false transparency that can yield only opacity at the level of meaning. But an alternative approach to the reduction—one that I see as aligned with Sedgwick’s notion of a “reparative” reading—does not take it as a site of transparency at all, false or true. Rather, Sedgwick and Frank find in Tomkins’s affect theory a “wealth of sites of productive opac-ity.”41 The source of this “productive opacity” lies precisely in what Leys identifies as Tomkins’s original sin: the “inefficiency of the fit between the affect system and the cognitive system.”42 Because the affects, according to Tomkins, have a much greater degree of freedom in relation to their ob-jects than the drives (or cognition), they can often be “wrong” about their objects.43 Hence the opacity. What makes this opacity “productive” for Sedgwick and Frank (following Tomkins) is that it is precisely the capacity to commit errors in motivation that “enables learning, development, con-tinuity, differentiation.”44 As opposed to Leys’s contention that the opacity produced by Tomkins’s partial dissociation of affect from cognition shuts down meaning, Sedgwick and Frank argue that “[f ]reedom, play, affor-dance, meaning itself derive from the wealth of mutually nontransparent possibilities for being wrong about an object—and, implicatively, about oneself.”45

In order to work through on a more concrete terrain these two ways of reading the reduction—as false transparency or as productive opacity—and to attempt to put them into some relation, I will now turn to a recent development in the neuroscience of emotion—the so-called mirror neuron paradigm. My aim will be to take this development as a case study of sorts

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for exploring a mode of critique capable of oscillating between paranoid and reparative stances.

III.

In the early 1990s, the Italian neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti and his research group at the University of Parma described an unusual re-sponse pattern in a group of cells located in the premotor cortex of ma-caque monkeys. What distinguished these neurons was that they fired both when the monkeys performed a given action (such as grasping) and when they observed the same action executed by another. Moreover, this response was shown to occur only in the case of actions with a discernible object or goal. Experimenters were subsequently able to demonstrate that different subsets of “mirror neurons”—as Rizzolatti christened them— re-sponded to kinetically similar actions when those actions were directed at different goals (i.e. grasping-to-get versus grasping-to-eat). The interpre-tation of this finding was that mirror neurons were coded not simply for actions but for intentions. Almost overnight, the hypothesis emerged that mirror neurons might provide a neurobiological explanation for how indi-viduals ascribe thoughts and feelings to others (a “theory of mind”). This hypothesis posits that mirror neurons produce a “simulation” at the neural level in which one responds to the perception of another’s action or expres-sion as if one were performing that same action or expression.46 Adopted by researchers as offering a neurophysiological explanation for the origin of language as well as empathy, a number of grandiose evolutionary claims were made on the part of mirror neurons culminating in the idea that they were the “neurons that shaped civilization.”47 Even as humanists and social scientists set about puncturing the ideological pretensions of such claims, the mirror neuron paradigm was already being subjected to vigorous in-ternal critique. By 2012, when Psychology Today dubbed it “the most hyped concept in neuroscience,” the initial fervor over mirror neurons had already cooled considerably within the field.48

The most prominent line of research to emerge from the mirror neuron paradigm concerns empathy. In their 2008 survey of the first decade and a half of research on mirror neurons, Mirrors in the Brain: How Our Minds Share Actions and Emotions, Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia proclaim that the discovery of this special class of neurons reveals the ba-


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sis for a “pre-conceptual and pre-linguistic form of understanding” in the brain.49 Empathy—conceived as a pre-reflective co-feeling with another—is then the name of this “form of understanding” applied to the emotions of others. Marco Iacoboni, one of the pioneers in this line of research, describes this hypothesis that empathy is an essentially neurophysiological phenomenon in the following way: “our mirror neurons fire when we see others expressing their emotions, as if we were making those expressions ourselves. By means of this firing, the neurons also send signals to emo-tional brain centers in the limbic system to make us feel what other people feel.”50 Mimetic immediacy, in this conception, betokens the naturalization of emotional understanding at a level prior to conscious thought. This im-mediacy, registered in the first instance at the neural level, has its correlate in the presumed transparency of the experimental trigger. In the case of neuroscientific experiments on empathy, images of the human face are the privileged experimental trigger or stimulus for studying neural responses to observing emotional expressions such as disgust. The assumption that these images function as prototypes of universally legible emotional ex-pressions, and hence the epistemological status accorded them within the experimental design, depends almost exclusively upon Paul Ekman’s “Basic Emotion View” (to use Leys’s term). Indeed, many of these experiments still use the black and white photographs of prototypical facial expressions published by Ekman and Friesen in Pictures of Facial Affect (1976). Those that use other sources of facial images (whether still or moving) or produce their own, nevertheless tend to rely upon the Ekman and Friesen’s Facial Action Coding System (FACS) for their standardization and classification.

Given these presuppositions and methods it is easy to see why research on mirror neurons and empathy would be a natural target for Leys’s critique. In the year following her “Turn to Affect” essay, she devoted an entire article to critiquing one of the most influential papers on the mirror neuron system and empathy. Leys’s critique of this paper continues her polemic against what she considers the scientifically unjustified hegemony of Ekman’s “Basic Emotions View” and the “anti-intentionalist” paradigm it supports in experimental research. Indeed, her assessment of the entire line of research represented by the paper is as familiar as it is unequivocal: “the problem of emotional empathy will never be solved if investigators persist in adopting the mirror-neuron theory and associated assumptions about the noncognitive, categorical nature of our emotions.”51 The correction

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she proposes for research on empathy is of a piece with her general view concerning the approach demanded by the complexity of affect as an object of study. Given its irreducible embeddedness in social contexts of meaning, empathy “ultimately requires the assistance of the humanities’ interpretative method.”52 This is the very repertoire of methods, as I have already remarked, that Leys accuses humanists of abandoning in their own approach to affect.

To be sure, if there is a site of suture between the humanities and neuroscience that cries out for a paranoid critique, it is surely the mirror neuron paradigm. The false transparency to be exposed in this paradigm lies in the naturalization of an essentially (neo)liberal notion of empathy as an unmediated and universal experience of mutual recognition. But even if one does not have to be long out of theory kindergarten to feel the imper-ative to expose this false transparency, how best to accomplish it is another question entirely. Moreover—and this is the more difficult problem I want to pursue in this second half of my essay—the subsequent question aris-es: once the work of paranoid exposure is done, what remains? After the paranoid reading of the reductions that mirror neuron research depends upon, is it possible to follow with a reparative reading that could assemble some new, provisional whole out of those reductions—now scattered like so many Kleinian part-objects—but one that does not necessarily resemble the “pre-existing whole” of initial research paradigm?53 To put it more sim-ply, is it possible to re-describe the material conditions of mirror neuron experiments in such a way that the findings exceed their original framing within an ideological horizon of empathy-as-mutual-transparency?

Mirror neuron experiments on human empathy share a formal struc-ture or dispositiv with numerous other studies that use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure neural responses to visual stimuli. Test subjects are placed in an fMRI machine and shown images of various facial expressions while the experimenters run a series of brain scans on them. This experimental set-up accommodates several significant variables: the number and identities of the test subjects; the medium of the images presented as stimuli (e.g. still photographs or moving video); the means of delivering those images to the subjects inside of the narrow confines of the fMRI tube (e.g. with a system of mirrors or through magnet-compatible goggles); and, most significantly, the nature of the tasks the subjects are asked to perform (e.g. alternation between passively observing and actively


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imitating or experiencing). Across these variations, this dispositiv enables the same basic experimental phenomena: facial images trigger a neural response that fMRI then detects, measures, and localizes. In this way, in-vestigators aim to catch the brain in the act, so to speak, of imitating a face. Or, to be more precise, they attempt to establish a mimetic correlation between two images—a brain scan and a photograph (or video).

But to call these both “images” already risks a false symmetry. An fMRI scan is not an image of a brain in the same sense that a photograph or vid-eo is the image of a face.54 In order to clarify the relation between these two sides of the experimental set-up, it is worth delving in some detail into their respective material and epistemological conditions, beginning with a somewhat technical description of the levels of mediation involved in fMRI scans of brain activity.

Contrary to common perception, magnetic resonance machines do not detect electrical signals produced by neurons firing. Rather, they provide an indirect measure of neural activity based on fluctuations in the magnetic properties of blood flow in the brain. The magnetic susceptibility of water molecules in the blood is affected by the concentration of deoxygenated hemoglobin molecules; oxygenated hemoglobin increases the signal, deoxygenated hemoglobin reduces it. This difference, called the blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) contrast, is picked up by detectors and used to estimate the average level of activity in a volume of brain tissue. Active neurons use more oxygen, so when a region of the brain is activated local blood vessels dilate and it receives an influx of oxygenated blood. Because the time scale of neuronal firing is much shorter than these vascular changes, the BOLD contrast must be calculated as a physiological consequence of neural activity that has occurred some seconds previously. Accounting as precisely as possible for this delay, researchers design experiments that use fMRI to measure brain activity during the performance of a specific task—such as observing photos or videos of faces.

A great deal of technical complexity is already involved in the generation of raw data at this first level. Translating that data into the anatomical representation of a brain introduces a host of additional difficulties at the next level. The initial format into which this data is fed is an abstract structure of numerical values and signal intensities called “k-space.” Rendering this data structure into a spatial and temporal image of the brain requires running it through tremendously complex algorithms.

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This computational process is in effect a kind of statistical averaging that “involves transforming, smoothing, warping, and stretching the data on each individual to fit the standard anatomical space.”55 What results from this process of averaging may be a brain image, but, as one philosopher of neuroscience puts it, “it is not an image of a brain. Brain images are best thought of as generalizations, not particulars.”56 Add to this the fact that the color schemes for representing neural activity, so familiar from images published in the popular press, are arbitrary conventions (i.e. reds for more active, blues for less), and it becomes even more evident why fMRI brain images should be regarded as “more akin to scientific diagrams or schematics than to photographs.”57

Thus, while it is one thing to call attention to the rhetorical power of fMRI images in popular accounts of the latest neuroscientific studies, it is quite another to claim that investigators themselves are under the sway of the same “myth of transparency” (to quote the subtitle of a recent sociolog-ical critique of fMRI).58 The opacity of these brain images with respect to the phenomena they mediate is an unavoidable dimension of neuroscientific practice. Researchers who use fMRI are by necessity familiar with how the epistemological status of brain scans depends on numerous technical and theoretical choices for the simple reason that they must grapple with and defend these choices at the level of their experimental design and execution.

What then of the other side of the experimental relation? What is the status of the images of facial affect that act as the stimuli or triggers for the brain activity to be scanned? On this side, I would argue, there surely is something like a “myth of transparency” at play, one that is not simply a function of the rhetoric that frames the experiment, but is in fact built into its design as a fundamental presupposition. And it is here, on the side of the stimulus, that Leys’s paranoid critique truly comes into its own. This brings us back to her analysis of Ekman’s “Basic Emotions View,” which Leys ar-gues has dominated emotion research in the United States and Europe for more than three decades. As I note above, Leys has analyzed this paradigm in several recent publications, including in her critique of mirror neuron re-search, where she provides a useful summary of its essential axioms:

[T]hat there exists a small number of basic emotions, such as disgust, that can be defined in evolutionary terms as universal or pancultural, adaptive respons-es of the organism; that these emotions are discrete, innate, reflex-like ‘affect


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programs’ located in subcortical parts of the brain; that the basic emotions manifest themselves in distinct patterns of physiological arousal and especial-ly in characteristic facial expressions; that according to Ekman’s ‘neurocultural’ model for explaining commonalities and variations in human facial displays socialization and learning may determine the range of stimuli that can ‘trigger’ the emotions and can moderate facial movements according to social norms or ‘display rules’ but that under the right conditions the underlying emotions can nevertheless leak out.59

Taken together these presuppositions underwrite the production of a set of prototypes of universally legible (or transparent) facial expressions of emotion used as stimuli to trigger brain activity. Leys’s critique of this par-adigm draws upon a dissenting line within the field of emotion research, led most notably by one of Ekman’s ex-students, Alan J. Fridlund, who has systematically criticized Ekman’s paradigm as both empirically flawed and theoretically incoherent.60 The position of Fridlund and other like-minded critics of Ekman lines up perfectly with Leys’s insistence on the centrality of intentionality to any adequate understanding of emotion. This means, among other things, that there can be no prototypes of automatic emo-tional expression because facial displays are not simply “read-outs” of inter-nal states but “dynamic and often highly plastic social and communicative signals.”61

IV.

Having considered the generic structure common to mirror neuron exper-iments, I want to turn now to the specific experiment that Leys critiques. Conducted early in the most intense period of research on mirror neurons, the results of this experiment were published in 2003 in the irresistibly ti-tled paper “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling Disgust.”62 The experiment was run in Marseille by Bruno Wicker in collaboration with Christian Keyers at Groningen and two of the founding figures of mirror neuron research, Vittorio Gallese and Giacomo Rizzolatti at Parma. The investigators sought to confirm what they called the “hot hypothesis” of our understanding of basic emotions in others such as disgust. In distinction from the “cold hypothesis,” whereby the emotion is inferred from facial expression in the form of a propositional

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representation, the “hot hypothesis” holds that observing disgust activates the same area of the brain (the anterior insula) responsible for experiencing that emotion. To prove the latter hypothesis, the experiment ran separate fMRI scans on the brains of 14 test subjects: first, while they viewed videos of faces expressing disgust (“visual runs”); and again when these subjects were subjected to a disgusting smell (“olfactory runs”). What Wicker et al. found was that the same locations in the insula were activated during the actual experience of disgust and during the observation of disgusted facial expressions of disgust in others. This result, they claimed, validated the “hot hypothesis” by indicating “that, for disgust, there is a common substrate for feeling an emotion and perceiving the same emotion in others.”63 The in-vestigators could then claim to have extended previous work on the role of mirror neurons in action understanding to their function in emotional un-derstanding (empathy) as well: “Thus, as observing hand actions activates the observer’s motor representation of that action, observing an emotion activates the neural representation of that emotion. This finding provides a unifying mechanism for understanding the behaviors of others.”64

Leys’s criticisms of this experiment proceed from her general critique of Ekman’s “Basic Emotions View,” which, she argues, uncritically sub-tends the design and conclusions of this experiment. She brings that cri-tique to bear upon what she considers a telling omission that exposes the incoherence at the heart of the entire endeavor:

Wicker et al. were so confident that faces normally and automatically ex-press the truth of the hypothesized basic emotions that it did not occur to them to ask the actors what they themselves were feeling when they sniffed the various odorants [in posing for the video stimuli]. … Nor did the investigators make any effort to find out or discern whether participants in the experiment felt disgust when they observed the actors posing facial expressions of disgust. This omission is all the more striking because, ac-cording to the ‘hot hypothesis,’ individuals recognize emotions by actually experiencing the same emotions themselves.65

Thus, “emotion was equated with brain activation, with the result that the distinction between subjective experience and neural response was elided.”66 Wicker et al. cannot demonstrate the subjective experience of empathy they claim because their experimental set-up evacuates subjectivity from the beginning.


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Leys’s critique of this experiment is clearly devastating with respect to the researchers’s own claims. But the question then is whether that there-fore exhausts all that is potentially interesting about this and similar ex-periments. Once we have exposed the false transparency performed via the slippage between neural representation and experience, what remains to be shown in the experiment? The answer for Leys is clear: nothing. The point of her critique of this experiment is to provide an object lesson in “what can go wrong in emotion research today” when it proceeds from the unsus-tainable presuppositions of the “anti-intentionalist” position. It is difficult to say precisely what sort of experimental designs might emerge from a reconstructed neuroscience of emotion organized around the “intentional-ist” paradigm, but they would surely look very different. In any case, what is clear about Leys’s critique as a paranoid reading is that it does not admit the possibility for a re-description of the experiment in terms other than those of the intentionalist/anti-intentionalist binary. Such a re-description requires shifting to a reparative position, one that comes, in this case, in the wake of the paranoid work of demystification.

A clue about where this position might begin is inadvertently supplied by Leys in pointing out what she considers the most symptomatic flaw in the “Both of Us Disgusted” experiment: that neither the test subjects nor the ac-tors who posed as the stimuli were asked whether they actually experienced disgust. Considered from the perspective I want to entertain here, this “flaw” is in fact a great strength in the experimental design. For it evades altogether the intractable mind/brain problem in neuroscience: the unbridgeable gap between the mutually exclusive levels of a test subject’s first-person phe-nomenological experience and the experimenter’s third-person observation of neural activity. In Slavoj Žižek’s vivid description, this is the “gap between the ‘inside’ experience of meaning and the ‘outside’ view of a flat, meaningless organism, this piece of meat that sustains our experience.”67 There is no third perspective that would mediate or synthesize these two levels, no experi-mental method capable of transcending the mere demonstration of correla-tion. As Leys argues, Wicker et al. do appear to smuggle a false presumption of interiority into their experiment through the slippage in their conclusions between the neural representation of emotion and its subjective experience. But once that slippage has been exposed, we are left with the materiality of the experimental set-up itself, which, purged of the interpolated metaphys-ics of interiority, now appears simply as a dispositiv for staging a relation

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between two (very differently constituted) images. In other words, we are no longer contending with the question of the relation between an inside and an outside—the experience of emotion and its expression (whether in a face or a brain)—but rather with the relation between two outsides.

From this perspective, Wicker et. al.’s procedure for producing the videos of facial expressions used as stimuli takes on added significance. The actors who appeared in these videos were recruited from a local theater school. They were filmed while leaning forward to smell the contents of a glass set in front of them. The glass contained, alternately, pure water (for neutral), perfume (for pleasure), or a stink bomb obtained from a toy store (for disgust). After smell-ing, the actors were asked to lean back and display the appropriate emotion “in a natural but clear way.”68 After each emotion was filmed three times per actor, the experimenters chose the “most natural example” to use as stimuli.69 How are we to understand the purpose of this triple redundancy—subjecting the actors to actual smells; requesting they perform a trained simulation of the (presumably) felt emotions corresponding to each of these smells; and, finally, selecting afterwards the most suitable (i.e. “natural”) examples of expression? It is of course possible to read this in a “paranoid” vein, catching Wicker et. al. in the performative contradiction of deeming it necessary to guarantee through artifice the very phenomenon that their study presupposes to be natural and automatic—the facial “read-out” of emotions experienced on a bodily level.70 But another approach, one that I am arguing is aligned with the reparative mode, would be to locate the real redundancy at the beginning of this se-quence, in the effort to produce an “authentic” experience of pleasure or disgust in the actors which could anchor one side of a mutually transparent relation with a neural representation of the same experience on the other side of the test subjects. In other words, rather than limiting itself to exposing this false transparency, a reparative position would take the expressions as opaque but nevertheless readable surfaces. Among other things, they would be readable for the conventions of naturalism for neuroscientists as well as a certain French acting school at this moment.

Leys approvingly quotes a review by the philosopher of science Ian Hacking of Ekman’s annotated edition of Charles Darwin’s The Expression of Emotion in Man and Animals for Oxford University Press.71 Hacking describes the illustrations of faces chosen by Darwin and Ekman as “quite extraordinary social documents” and remarks that “I am not sure I have seen anyone in real life looking like any of these people.”72 Rather than


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simply discrediting these facial expressions, the apparently unnatural or posed aspect Hacking comments on suggests how we might think mirror neurons, in this case, in a way that challenges and exceeds the (neo)liberal horizon of empathy as mutual transparency in which they have thus far been relegated. The point, however, is not to just expose the ideological dimension of this naturalization of empathy by showing how the purport-edly “biological” elements in these experiments were “artificial” or “cultural” all along. But more productively, perhaps, the aim is to consider how these experiments could be read to reveal an unexpected proximity between the biological and what we might call a fictional capacity.

To return for a moment to the actors used to produce the video stimuli in the “Both of Us Disgusted” experiment, we have seen that they were asked to simultaneously experience and simulate affect. (Smell this dis-gusting smell and then act as if you are disgusted.) Once we have bracketed the question of experience, the simulation splits off and assumes an auton-omous value qua simulation—in the fictional mode of the as if. Recall that the founding hypothesis of mirror neurons is that they produce a “simu-lation” at the neural level in which the brain responds to the perception of another’s action or expression as if one were performing that same action or expression.73 Now we might see a very different sort of relation between the stimulus and the neural activity it triggers than that of mutual trans-parency. Moreover, this fully external and asymmetrical relation between two very different as if ’s appears by virtue of the experimental reductions on both sides, and Leys is absolutely right that traditional hermeneutic tools are not going to be very helpful here.

To push this notion of externality towards a logical limit, imagine taking the dispositiv of a typical mirror neuron experiment and replacing the images of facial expressions used for stimuli with non-expressive objects such as abstract geometrical shapes. In fact, this is essentially what some neuroscientists in the UK have done in an effort to establish an alternative theory of mirror neurons.74 The standard view holds that mirror neurons are heritable genetic properties that evolved to perform specific socio-cognitive functions. The alternative view, called the “associative account,” argues on the contrary that mirror neurons are the product of sensorimotor associative learning. This account holds that mirror neurons are not evolutionarily coded to respond to particular objects or actions but are, rather, motor neurons that have “learned” through association to also

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fire in response to certain perceptions. Training subjects to have mirror neuron responses to images of abstract shapes was thus an ingenious way to test this account and to demonstrate both the contingency and a degree of plasticity in the mirror neuron system with respect to its objects. According to Cecilia Heyes, one of the primary proponents of the “associative account,” in “evolutionary terms, [mirror neurons] are not for anything.”75 By separating the question of function from origin, Heyes shifts the question from what mirror neurons are for to “what they can do.”76 And that is an empirically open question, one that does not refer back to any specific, pre-existing picture of social relation and unity (one grounded in the naturalization of empathy, e.g.).

Conclusion: Uncle Ira’s Scar

By way of conclusion, I would like return to the paranoid scene Jack Finney constructs in the opening chapters of “The Body Snatchers.” The first thing Wilma tells the narrator, Dr. Miles Bennell, in her effort to convince him that her Uncle Ira has been replaced by a duplicate is the story of a scar.

‘Every little move, everything about him is exactly like Ira’s. … I’ve been waiting for today,’ she whispered. ‘Waiting till he’d get a haircut, and he finally did.’ Again she leaned toward me, eyes big, her voice a hissing whisper. ‘There’s a little scar on the back of Ira’s neck … You can’t see the scar,’ she whispered, ‘when he needs a haircut. But when his neck is shaved, you can. Well, today—I’ve been waiting for this!—today he got a haircut—’

I sat forward, suddenly excited. ‘And the scar’s gone? You mean—’

‘No!’ she said, almost indignantly, eyes flashing. ‘It’s there—the scar—exactly like Uncle Ira’s!’77

This exchange can be read as a kind of inverted recognition scene. Wilma’s impatience with Miles comes from the fact that, from her perspective, the scar is proof that this imposter is not Uncle Ira. That is, her recognition of the true Uncle Ira depends upon her accustomed intuition of his interiority; in the blockage of that intuition, it is as if this imposter is only exteriority. To recall my initial comparison with Leys’s critique of affect theory, we


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might say that Uncle Ira’s scar betokens a materialist reduction of affect to the corporeal.

As a device for staging a scene of (non)recognition, Uncle Ira’s scar has a surprisingly classical antecedent in a famous scene from book 19 of the Odyssey. Odysseus, who has returned home in disguise, is recognized by his one-time nurse Euryclea when she sees the scar on his thigh while washing his feet. In Aristotle’s taxonomy of recognition (anagnôrisis), Odysseus’s scar exemplifies the lowest, crudest means: recognition by physical signs on a character’s body (birthmarks, necklaces or scars).78 Erich Auerbach begins his magisterial study of Western literature, Mimesis, by returning to Homer’s scene of recognition-by-scar. In his opening chapter, entitled simply “Odysseus’ Scar,” Auerbach sets out two basic styles of realism in European literature. On the one hand, there is the “Homeric style,” for which the Odyssey is the paradigm, characterized by “fully externalized description, uniform illumination, uninterrupted connection, free expression, all events in the foreground, displaying unmistakable meanings, few elements of historical development and of psychological perspective.” On the other hand, there is its opposite number, the “Biblical style,” exemplified by the King James version of the Old Testament, in which “certain parts brought into high relief, others left obscure, abruptness, suggestive influence of the unexpressed, ‘background’ quality, multiplicity of meanings and the need for interpretation, universal-historical claims, development of the concept of the historically becoming, and preoccupation with the problematic.”79

My point in making this slightly facetious link between the scars of Uncle Ira and Odysseus in the context of Auerbach’s analysis is not to give “anti-intentionalism” a Homeric pedigree. Nor do I wish to force a sim-plistic alignment of Auerbach’s opposed styles of realist representation with Sedgwick’s two modes of reading (though I think the resonances are clear enough). And, finally, it should not be news to anyone that the de-fense of interpretative method as the sine-qua-non of the humanities—and erstwhile antidote for reductionism in the sciences—might depend upon the valorization of certain aesthetic forms over others. My point is simply to suggest that insofar as Leys’s critique of affect asserts an exclu-sive privilege for intentionality and interpretation, it tends to limit itself to an ultimately tautological notion of meaning as what is to be found in those forms and phenomena that demand a hermeneutic approach. From

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this restricted perspective, meaning condensed in external sensibility—that is, meaning’s reduction to an opaque but legible surface—can only appear as the ruse of false transparency awaiting exposure.80

My thanks to Corinne Blalock, Sudeep Dasgupta, Rachel Greenspan, Carolyn Laubend-er, Toni Pape, and Markus Stauff for their insightful comments at various stages of this essay.

NOTES

1 Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University

Press, 2003), 130; hereafter abbreviated “TF.”

2 Jack Finney, “The Body Snatchers,” Collier’s Weekly (Friday, November 26, 1954): 21.

3 Joseph Capgras et J. Reboul-Lachaux, “L’illusion des ‘sosies’ dans un délire systématise chronique,” Bull. Soc.

Clinique Med. Mentale 2 (1923): 6-16.

4 J. Hoberman, “Paranoia and the Pods,” Sight and Sound 4. 5 (1994): 28-31.

5 Fredric Jameson, “Reification and Utopia in Mass Culture,” Social Text no. 1 (Fall, 1979): 26.

6 Ibid., 27.

7 See: Ruth Leys, “How Did Fear Become a Scientific Object and What Kind of Object Is It?” Represen-

tations 110, no. 1 (May 2010): 66–104; Ruth Leys and Marlene Goldman, “Navigating the Genealogies of

Trauma, Guilt, and Affect: An Interview with Ruth Leys,” University of Toronto Quarterly 79, no. 2 (April 1,

2010): 656-679; Ruth Leys, “The Turn to Affect: A Critique,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Spring 2011): 434-72; Ruth

Leys, “A World Without Pretense? Honest and Dishonest Signaling in Social Life,” Philosophy of Educa-

tion (2013): 25-42; Ruth Leys, “‘Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula’: Mirror-Neuron Theory and Emotional

Empathy” in Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, Eds. Frank Biess and Daniel M.

Gross (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2014).

8 See Ruth Leys, From Guilt to Shame: Auschwitz and After (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 123-

56.

9 TF 126.

10 Sedgwick takes her concept of “positions,” along with the specific rhetoric of repair aligned with the “de-

pressive position,” from Melanie Klein. “The flexible to-and-fro movement implicit in Kleinian positions will

be useful for my discussion of paranoid and reparative critical practices, not as theoretical ideologies (and

certainly not as stable personality types of critics), but as changing and heterogeneous relational stances.” TF

128.

11 See William E. Connolly, “The Complexity of Intention,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Summer 2011): 791-798; Ruth

Leys, “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to William E. Connolly,” Critical Inquiry 37 (Sum-

mer 2011): 799-805; Adam Frank and Elizabeth A. Wilson, “Like-Minded,” Critical Inquiry 38 (Summer


61

2012): 870-877; Charles Altieri, “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition: A Response to Ruth Leys,” Critical

Inquiry 38 (Summer 2012): 878-881; Ruth Leys, “Facts and Moods: Reply to My Critics,” Critical Inquiry 38

(Summer 2012): 882-891.

12 Leys, “Turn to Affect,” 472.

13 She identifies her chief ally and interlocutor for this position as Walter Benn Michaels, whose book The Shape

of the Signifier (2004) mounted an analogous polemic in the field of literary studies against what he takes to

be a misguided posthistoricist logic that disavows the work of interpretation in the name of identitarian

difference. Like Leys, Michaels traces the problem to the ascendance of anti-intentionality within his field

during the latter part of the 20th century. His argument in a nutshell is that the critique of intentionalism

launched by deconstructive literary theory and its concomitant focus on the materiality of the signifier lead

to a situation in which the analysis of texts was reduced to descriptions of how they are experienced from the

vantage of various different subject positions. Michaels’s political claim is that this evacuates both interpreta-

tion and argument from critical discourse because, in Leys’s gloss, “a concern with disagreements over beliefs

and intentions is replaced by a concern with differences in personal experience.” Leys, From Shame to Guilt,

155.

14 See note 11.

15 TF 130.

16 TF 127.

17 TF 126.

18 Connolly, “Complexity of Intention.”

19 Frank and Wilson, “Like-Minded,” 877.

20 TF 134.

21 Frank and Wilson’s critical response is exemplary here: “All this makes Leys’s claim about influence and

like-mindedness hard to sustain. We feel that she shares with mainstream psychology an inclination for

broad, synthesizing accounts of the history of affect theory, an inclination that tends to wash out the color

and distinctiveness of these different intellectual positions.” Frank and Wilson, “Like-Minded,” 874.

22 Silvan S. Tomkins, Affect Imagery Consciousness: Volume II, The Negative Affects (1963): 433-34; qtd in TF 134.

23 TF 136.

24 Foucault takes this term from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882). See Michel Foucault, “Nietzsche, Geneal-

ogy, History” in The Foucault Reader, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: Pantheon Books, 1984): 77. Leys refers to

this essay as a significant statement of the genealogical method she has adopted. See: Leys, “Navigating the

Genealogies.”

25 Leys, “Without Pretense,” 33.


27 Ibid., 443.

28 When I say that the “Basic Emotions View” is a site of obsessive exposure for Leys, I am referring to the

fact that she has presented variations on the same critique of this view all four of the major articles she has

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published since From Guilt to Shame (2009), where she presented the initial version of the critique.

29 Leys, “The Turn to Affect,” 437.

30 Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, Pictures of Facial Affect (Palo Alto, 1976).

31 Leys, “Affect, Intentionality, and Cognition,” 803.


33 Leys and Goldman, “Navigating the Genealogies,” 666.

34 The question of whether and to what extent it is possible to distance Tomkins’s work from that of his student

Ekman is at the crux of the exchange between Leys’s and two of her stronger critics, Adam Frank and Eliz-

abeth A. Wilson. See: Frank and Wilson, “Like-Minded” and Leys, “Facts and Moods.”

35 TF 94.

36 TF 101.


38 TF 108.

39 Ibid.

40 Ibid.

41 TF 106-7.

42 TF 107.

43 In Sedgwick’s gloss of Tomkins: “affects have greater freedom with respect to object, for unlike the drives, ‘any

affect may have any ‘object.’ This is the basic source of complexity of human motivation and behavior.’” The

object of affects such as anger, enjoyment, excitement, or shame is not proper to the affects in the same way

that air is the object proper to respiration…” TF 19.

44 TF 107.

45 TF 107-8.

46 In Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio identifies a “functional resemblance” between the simulation theory

of mirror neurons and his famous idea of the “as if loop” of embodied consciousness: “So-called mirror neu-

rons are, in effect, the ultimate as-if body device.” Antonio R Damasio, Self Comes to Mind : Constructing the

Conscious Brain, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 103.

47 Vilayanur Ramachandran, The Neurons That Shaped Civilization, Accessed June 4, 2017. https://www.ted.com/

talks/vs_ramachandran_the_neurons_that_shaped_civilization.

48 “Mirror Neurons: The Most Hyped Concept in Neuroscience?” Psychology Today, Accessed May 1, 2017.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/brain-myths/201212/mirror-neurons-the-most-hyped-concept-in-

neuroscience. According to the medical anthropologist Allan Young, a fervent critic of the paradigm, mirror

neurons enjoyed their “period of most intense interest between 2002 and 2007.” Allan Young, “The Social

Brain and the Myth of Empathy,” Science in Context 25, no. 3 (2012): 403.

49 Giacomo Rizzolatti and Corrado Sinigaglia, Mirrors in the Brain : How Our Minds Share Actions and Emo-

tions (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), xi-xiii. This identification took place in the lab of Giacomo

Rizzolatti at the University of Parma and was first reported in Di Pelligrino et al., “Understanding Motor


63

Events: A Neurophysiological Study,” Experimental Brain Research 91, no. 1 (1992): 176-80. The term “mirror

neuron” first appeared in Vittorio Gallese et al., “Action Recognition in the Premotor Cortex,” Brain 119, no.

2 (April 1, 1996): 593–609. n92.

50 Marco Iacoboni, Mirroring People: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others (New York: Pica-

dor, 2009), 119.

51 Ruth Leys, “‘Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula’: Mirror-Neuron Theory and Emotional Empathy” in Sci-

ence and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, eds. Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago: The

University of Chicago Press, 2014), 68.

52 Ibid., 67.

53 TF 128.

54 For a lucid examination of the epistemological strengths and weakness of fMRI see: Adina Roskies, “Neu-

roimaging and Inferential Distance,” Neuroethics 1, no. 1 (March 2008): 19–30. In addition to this text, my

description of fMRI technology below also draws from: Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience

Tells Us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012), 123-26; Alva Noë, Out of Our Heads: Why

You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness (New York: Hill and Wang, 2010),

19-24; Nikolas Rose and Joelle M. Abi-Rached, Neuro: The New Brain Sciences and the Management of the Mind

(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 53-81.

55 Rose and Abi-Rached, Neuro, 78.

56 Roskies, “Neuroimaging and Inferential Distance,” 26.

57 Ibid.

58 Kelly A. Joyce, Magnetic Appeal: MRI and the Myth of Transparency (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008).

There have been a number of studies examining the epistemologically compelling effect of brain scan images

on consumers of scientific literature, even when those images add no explanatory value. While these studies

have shown that this bias effects both naïve subjects and those with some minimal college level neuroscience

training, it was not shown to have an effect on practicing neuroscientists. See: Deena Skolnick Weisberg et

al., “The Seductive Allure of Neuroscience Explanations,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20, no. 3 (No-

vember 15, 2007): 470–477; Cayce J. Hook and Martha J. Farah, “Look Again: Effects of Brain Images and

Mind–Brain Dualism on Lay Evaluations of Research,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 25, no. 9 (April 22,

2013): 1397–1405.

59 Leys, “Both of Us,” 73.

60 See: Alan J. Fridlund, Human Facial Expression: An Evolutionary View (San Diego: Academic Press, 1994);

and Alan J. Fridlund, “The New Ethology of Human Facial Expression,” in The Psychology of Facial Expression,

eds. James A. Russell and José Miguel Fernández-Dols (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 103-

29.


62 Wicker, Bruno et al., “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula: The Common Neural Basis of Seeing and Feeling

Disgust,” Neuron 40, no. 3 (October 30, 2003): 655–664.

Geil

64

63 Ibid., 656.

64 Ibid., 655.

65 Leys, “Both of Us,” 76.

66 Ibid.

67 Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 222.

68 Wicker et al., “Both of Us Disgusted in My Insula,” 661.

69 Ibid.

70 This is in fact one of Leys’s criticisms of this aspect of the study, together with the fact that the experimenters

seem to be naïve about the very rich and complex history of the theatrical expression of emotion wherein

what counts as a “natural” expression cannot be taken for granted.

71 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 3rd ed. Intro., Afterword, and Commen-

taries by Paul Ekman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

72 Ian Hacking, “By What Links are the Organs Excited?” Times Literary Supplement ( July 17, 1998): 11.

73 In Self Comes to Mind, Antonio Damasio identifies a “functional resemblance” between the simulation theory

of mirror neurons and his famous idea of the “as if loop” of embodied consciousness: “So-called mirror neu-

rons are, in effect, the ultimate as-if body device.” Antonio R Damasio, Self Comes to Mind: Constructing the

Conscious Brain, 1st ed. (New York: Pantheon Books,, 2010), 103.

74 See Clare Press, Caroline Catmur, Richard Cook, Hannah Widmann, Cecilia Heyes, and Geoffrey Bird.

“fMRI Evidence of ‘Mirror’ Responses to Geometric Shapes,” PLOS ONE 7, no. 12 (December 14, 2012).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0051934

75 Cecilia Heyes, “A new approach to mirror neurons: Developmental history, system-level theory and interven-

tion experiments.” Cortex 49 (November/December 2013): 2946.

76 Ibid., 2948. See also: Cecilia Heyes, “Where do mirror neurons come from?” Neuroscience and Biobehavioral

Reviews, 34 (2010): 575-583.

77 Finney, “The Body Snatchers,” 90.

78 Aristotle contrasted these devices with what he considered the highest narrative means of recognition, the

revelation of identity through incident. Here Oedipus is the exemplar. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. Ingram Bywa-

ter (New York: The Modern Library, 1954, 1984), 1454b19–1455a21.

79 Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard R. Trask (Prince-

ton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 23.

80 My criticism here has certain affinities with the remarks of Charles Altieri in his response to Leys’s “Turn

to Affect” article: “In the name of lucidity she offers justifications for a blindness to what are substantial

sources of pleasure and significance for many people who want to take seriously the intention simply to feel

the powers of their own capacities of attention and care. It would be very strange if there were only one kind

of intentionality or one version of cognition capable of including the range of states that begins with simple

awareness and extends to the mind’s preparation for action.” Charles Altieri, “Affect, Intentionality, and

Cognition,” 881.

paranoid critiques, reparative reductions: leys, …

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