Abstract
There is a playful tone to Stephen Frosh’s short introductory text exploring the paradoxes and politics of ‘feeling’. I found it more entertaining and less frustrating than I usually find short, ‘accessible’ introductions to complex topics, which I tend to think are more useful to the expert looking for a quick reminder than to someone new to the field. Perhaps I enjoyed it because it is, after all, a field that I am familiar with, but it may also be because the book is organized in a way that avoids any sense of a defined canon. Frosh not only refers to relevant sociological, psychological and psychoanalytic theories but also uses more everyday questions to explore the meaning of feelings, their powerful and often unspoken effects in the social world, their relation to the self, their unknowability and their tendency to suddenly mean something quite different. The lighthearted aspect of the book is reflected in the chapter headings – ‘Feeling funny-peculiar’, ‘Oh, misery!’ and ‘Are you happy now?’ – but Frosh’s discussion also raises serious questions about how life should be lived and explores broader tensions in the conceptualization of ethics, politics and therapy.
These conceptual tensions are threaded throughout the text. The normative demand that a human life requires an experience of emotional intensity vies with the pragmatic recognition of the necessity of psychical defenses against unbearable affect. Faith in the subversive potential of affective experience comes up against the requirement to demonstrate political engagement through institutional and economic processes. The notion of therapy as cure is undone by a psychoanalytic goal of coming to understand human subjectivity through an examination of the unconscious. These tensions in some sense replicate ongoing tensions permeating the fields of post-structuralist theory, psychoanalysis and post-psychoanalytic social science, so that along with exploring ways of thinking about ‘feelings’, the text can also be read as a microcosm of a range of broader conceptual and methodological debates. However, the play of exegesis and critique required by the genre of the introductory text means that the position of the author within these debates can be submerged. It is possible that this slightly ambiguous position is one from which Frosh derives some enjoyment – an opportunity for playful shifts in tone, between the self-consciously literary language of some of his sources, pedagogic exposition, and more colloquial interjections that puncture some of the pretensions of intellectual position takings. Nevertheless, a question remains about what it might mean to resist or to fail to take up a fixed position within certain academic debates.
Throughout Feelings, there is a regular reiteration of a normative injunction to experience affect: the suggestion that ‘one is only fully human if one can experience intensity’ (p. 5) or ‘one has to ask what is the point of living without depth’ (p. 39). As Frosh points out, these statements carry a certain ethical weight, a regulatory force or condemnation. Where am I when I read that ‘if settledness and quiet is what we aspire to, we will get this when we are dead’ (p. 34)? There is an ambiguity in Frosh’s own positioning in relation to this kind of assertion, which he mitigates with acknowledgements of the need to defend ourselves against the overwhelming flood of painful affect: ‘not only are denial and other types of defence very common, but there are occasions on which they are advisable too’ (p. 25). These moves between the injunction to feel and the need to defend are refined and crystallized through a consideration of the impossibility of knowing one’s feelings and a questioning of the meaning or authenticity of feelings outside a particular context. This double valence of feeling, the excess of affect that is beyond knowledge and the formation of emotion within the social bond, provides, perhaps, a conceptual grounding for Frosh’s apparently shifting ethics of feeling and being human.
Similarly, the text articulates a slightly tantalized, yearning relation towards the possibility of knowing our own or another’s affective experience, a central point of contention within the fields of psychoanalysis and psychosocial studies. Frosh twice cites Alphonso Lingis’s account of what it might mean to listen to the unknowable affect of the other, to hear ‘internal noise’:
… the rasping or smouldering breath, the hyperventilating or somnolent lungs, the rumblings and internal echoes – in which the message is particularized and materialized and in which the empirical reality of something indefinitely discernible, encountered in the path of one’s own life, is referred to and communicated. (Lingis, cited by Frosh, p. 27 and p. 70)
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He appears to be somewhat captured by this evocation of a possibility of intimacy or a tenuous engagement with unknowable affect, the excessive part of what it is to be human. But at the same time, he is sceptical, puncturing the pleasurable possibility with the qualification that such intimations of a recognition of the other in their difference ‘can also be based on a severe misapprehension – we might think we know what is going on but be hopelessly, willfully mistaken’ (p. 71). In a similar way, Frosh appears seduced by the suggestion that intense sensory experiences associated with a suspension of breathing – fainting, trembling, sneezing, hiccupping, laughter, wheezing, trance or the ecstasy of orgasm – might put one outside of oneself in a way that brings about a fundamental change in subjectivity but then condemns this as fancy, saying, ‘it would be nice to think that such experiences have meaning, and that the meaning they have is life-enhancing in the way that feeling itself might be’ (p. 35). The slightly dismissive ‘nice’ mocks the self-indulgence of taking enjoyment in the potency of apparently everyday sensory experience. Within the confines of this text, it feels as if Frosh is momentarily captured but unable to fully occupy a position of faith in these ineffable, intangible affective intensities. His puncturing of these ideas reminds me of his own account of envy in the book:
when envy is intense, the perception of a good object can be as painful as that of a bad one, for the better it is the more it gives rise to envious wishes. Envy, therefore, amongst other things, destroys hope. (p. 59)
Or perhaps this is a projection of my own tentative hope and destructive envy when the possibility of a new way of thinking about affect is raised in a way that still feels somehow beyond me: This kind of envious disavowal is perhaps an inevitable element of the psychical structure of academic practice (see Lapping, 2011).
I think it is important to speculate on the possibility that the shifts and ambiguities in Frosh’s position might relate not simply to the genre of his text but might tell us something about the complex psychical processes involved in the attempt to engage with the im-possiblity of knowing either oneself or another subject, and about the challenge that this presents to our everyday assumptions, the identifications and projections that constitute our relations to others. In another recent book, Psychoanalysis Outside the Clinic (2010), Frosh clarifies the political significance of these questions:
how does one craft relationships with others that are not colonizing (reducing the other to the same, failing to appreciate difference), yet also not premised on the positioning of the other as an alien, with its connotations of hostile threat? (p. 128)
Using a similar expository style to that in Feelings, he traces different approaches to this problem: from Benjamin’s theorization of the possibility of constructing a fragile, shared space between subject and other to Levinas’s conceptualization of responsibility for the other in their radical difference as the basis of human subjectivity; from Lingis’s account of ‘internal noise’, the material excess beyond any rational or linguistic communication, as that which constitutes human life to Zizek’s description of this excess as not human, but precisely inhuman, a ‘monstrous, impenetrable Thing’ (pp. 130–144). He finishes with an account of the play between Butler and Zizek’s accounts of the concept of ethical violence. He suggests that both demonstrate the way that psychoanalysis can enhance philosophical theorizations of ethics through its precise conceptualization of the ‘disruptive presence’ of otherness within the subject (p. 149). For Butler, the social/the other is not only constitutive of the subject but also leaves an unknowable excess, an opacity within the subject that might constitute the basis for recognition of the unknowability of the other: ‘precisely my own opacity to myself occasions my capacity to confer a certain kind of recognition on others. It would be, perhaps, an ethics based on our shared, invariable, and partial blindness about ourselves’ (cited in Frosh, 2010, p. 146). Butler suggests, therefore, that it is possible to constitute an ethical relation that does not exploit the other by coming to recognize the other as an unknowable constituent of the self, provoking the unanswerable question: ‘Who is this you that resides in me, from whom I cannot extricate myself?’ (cited in Frosh, p. 150). Zizek, in contrast, suggests that this account tames the monstrosity of the encounter with ‘an intrusive foreignness that goes beyond the conceptualizations of self and other’ (cited in Frosh, p. 151). He suggests that true ethics, rather than suppressing this monstrosity, engages with its destructiveness as an inhuman force. The ethical stance is thus not to recognize or construct some commonality between subjects but to violently disrupt individualized, humanized relations by showing that there is a faceless something outside subjectivity that needs to be given priority (p. 154).
At the end of this exposition, Frosh’s own relation to these ideas becomes slightly clearer. While sympathetic to his position, he notes that even Zizek cannot wholly avoid at points articulating his ethics as a shared sense of ‘the same’ monstrous void. Frosh argues, ‘There always seems to be some wish for a kind of shelter in the presence of the other, even amongst those most opposed to the humanistic emphasis on the meaning-producing individual subject’. He concludes that human relations will always be infected by something ‘“personal” and specific and consequently [in Zizek’s terms] caring and “unjust”’ (p. 155). This replicates other moves he makes that puncture the status of abstract theorization, constituting his own position, perhaps, as not only interested in the impossibility of knowing the other but also curious to explore the material complexity of putting such conceptualizations into practice. The shifting authorial voice constituted in the exegetical genre of the introductory text is, perhaps, consistent with this desire to foreground the impossibility of fully materializing a position within theoretical or philosophical debates.
So, while some of Frosh’s specific ideas may be more explicitly argued through in other publications, Feelings offers a pleasantly sceptical way into these complex debates. Its very short chapters (none more than 10 pages) would work well as additional set readings, as provocations for classroom discussion or as a starting point for more personal reflections on affect and emotions and their position in life and politics.