Both Meaningful and Embodied: Moving Towards Dynamical Approaches in the History of Experience

How Emotives Work and Brains Change: The Problem of Intentionality

In his 1997 article “Against Constructionism,” Reddy introduced the concept of the “emotive” to account for the feedback effect between emotion expression and experience (1997, 2008, p. 87). Emotion expressions, he argued, are not descriptive or constructive. They are performative: a means to strategically explore and alter emotions (Reddy, 1997, p. 331, 2004, pp. 96–100, 104–105). This insight allowed Reddy to explain the phenomenon of ‘emotional suffering.’ Emotional suffering occurs when we are unable to express what we feel in a way appropriate to the emotional style or regime (a more or less restrictive “form of life” regarding appropriate emotional expression) in which everyone is situated (Reddy, 2004, pp. 124–125, 2008, p. 85, 97). ⁷ To Reddy, a particular form of emotional suffering is caused by emotive failure; when the feedback effect of an expression does not elicit the emotions that should, according to the emotional regime, be felt (2004, pp. 102–105, 121; Reddy, 2008, p. 85, 97). The emotive effect is complex and unpredictable. For instance, Reddy wrote: “After insisting I am happy, I might break down in tears” (Reddy, 2008, p. 96). To attain specific experiences, effortful emotional navigation may be needed. As an example of this navigation, Reddy discusses the correspondence between two early eighteenth-century lovers who, through specific expressions, tried to attain the specific types of emotions required by the emotional regime of their context (Reddy, 2008, pp. 97–98). Reddy's framework thus allows us to think about the friction between the way one is supposed to feel, the tools one has to feel that way, and the way one feels. If emotions were mere cultural constructs, without a “real world-anchor,” and if individuals were “entirely empty and wholly plastic,” then, Reddy argues, there would be “nothing in virtue of which liberation is good” (1997, pp. 328, 331; see also 2004, pp. 47, 114). On the contrary, individuals should be understood as constantly engaging in a kind of self-management or emotional navigation, through which emotional styles and regimes can “rise and fall” (Reddy, 2008, p. 85).

The rich concepts of the emotive, of emotional navigation and of emotional suffering are still central to the field of the history of emotions. Less attention, however, has been given to the model of cognition underlying them. In the decade following his 1997 publication, Reddy proposed a sophisticated theory of the workings of emotives by relying on computational and representational frameworks. Those frameworks assume that the brain can be described as processing information in a way similar to computers. The specific strand of computationalism Reddy referred to insists on the partially top-down character of brain processing: “processing occurs at all levels nearly simultaneously, and the results of higher-level processing are quickly fed back down, or cascade down, to aid the rapid completion of, or sometimes to short-circuit, lower level processing” (2009, p. 20). When perceiving an object, our mind compares the sensory input it receives with a representation, a “visual buffer” that was created on the basis of previous perceptions (Reddy, 2008, pp. 88–89, 2009, p. 20). On the basis of this comparison at a higher level, meaning is anticipated, thereby speeding up the work of lower level processing (Reddy, 2008, p. 90). This model allowed Reddy to account for the influence of contexts and practices on the way the human brain works, thereby evading the more reductive approaches that posit the brain as completely hard-wired, and accounting for the second criterion posed in the introduction. To him, “the computer analogy and the notion of parallel processing offer a vision of a dynamic system that is not tied down by any one algorithm” (Reddy, 2009, p. 12). The emotive as it was conceived of here relied precisely on this top down feedback effect of our parallel processing systems since the expression of an emotion would bring about the activation of the previously registered “buffer,” through which a “much wider range of thought material becomes available to attention” (Reddy, 2008, pp. 92, 95). It is by activating the attention to this thought material, that emotives may strengthen or weaken the expressed emotion.

In a recent article, however, Reddy voiced an important critique against computational models of cognition. Indeed, he noted that “this way of talking sets aside the question of intentionality without resolving it” (Reddy, 2020, p. 175). In arguing for “the unavoidable intentionality of affect,” he builds on Ruth Leys’ critique of affect, and follows in the footsteps of many philosophers who argued against the use of the computer-metaphor as an explanatory framework for the workings of cognition. For instance, as was argued by John R. Searle in his famous Chinese Room argument, cognition involves understanding and intentionality, which cannot be accounted for by mere computation (Searle, 1980). Cognition is more than the reading of a script, however changing and indeterminate that script may be. As an alternative to internal and representational understandings of emotions, Reddy in this most recent article reminds his readers of the emotive—a concept that indeed puts forward the dynamical character of emotion experience. As we have seen, however, the concept of the emotive was originally conceived of by means of a computational understanding of cognition, and Reddy has not yet offered us an alternative framework to that of parallel processing and representations for understanding how emotives work.

The problem of intentionality is not exclusive to Reddy's approach to history. Indeed, I mentioned in the introduction Ruth Leys’ similar critique of Smail and Hunt's Neurohistorical approach (see also: Boddice, 2019a; Boddice & Smith, 2020, p. 21; Plamper, 2015, p. 172). It is important to note, however, that just like Reddy, Smail adjusted his position. Although originally describing emotions as automatic and universal, he did more recently endorse the idea of historicizing them. ⁸ While doing so, he continued to emphasize the importance of the material properties of the body: “the brain is constructing experience out of embodied changes that arise because of the body's material properties” (Smail in: Boddice, 2019a, p. 316). In a similar vein, Lynn Hunt sketches a picture of an embodied self, that is neither constructed by discourse nor computed by the brain (2014, pp. 1582, 1585–1586). Rather, drawing on enactivist traditions, she argues that “the interactions between body and brain and environment and body create the self” (Hunt, 2014, p. 1582). This emphasis on the role of the body as a dynamical entity in experience is shared by other historians of the emotions. In the following section I will analyze the underlying frameworks of two of the most prominent approaches to the history of emotions that aim explicitly at bringing the body into history, without automatizing or naturalizing emotions.

Enculturing the Emotive Body: The Problem of Corporeal Impersonalism

The first after Smail and Hunt to develop a methodology for the history of the emotions seeking to include the brain-body without naturalizing its emotions, was Monique Scheer, who proposed to understand emotions as embodied practices. ⁹ Building on Reddy but taking a different route, Scheer did not rely on computationalism and representationalism to explain emotions, nor on deep history's non-cognitive and automatic processes. Rather, by drawing on the central claims of Extended, Enacted, Embedded, and Embodied cognition, she proposed an externalist understanding of cognition as spread out over the body and the environment (Scheer, 2012, p. 197). She argued that emotions should be understood as “cultural practices” that are “executed by a mindful body” (Scheer, 2012, p. 205). This view fits with the second criterion, the embedding of cultural emotions in an embodied system. To further characterize the practice or “doing” of emotions, she draws on Bourdieu's practice theory (Scheer, 2012, p. 198). A practice in this view is a “nexus of doings and sayings,” a structure that guides and invites further actions (Scheer, 2012, p. 200). Scheer argued that Bourdieu allows us to understand “the infusion of the physical body with social structure, both of which participate in the production of emotional experience” (Scheer, 2012, p. 199). Emotions, thus, are not processes confined to the brain and later expressed publicly, but external practices themselves (Scheer, 2012, p. 198; see also Shusterman, 1999, p. 7). These emotions-as-practices, arise from emotional practices: “such as speaking, gesturing, remembering, manipulating objects, and perceiving sounds, smells, and spaces” (Scheer, 2012, p. 209). For instance, Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker applied Scheer's framework in her analysis of the role of the embodied practice of taking care of an infant in the development of the emotion of motherly love in the nineteenth century (Davison et al., 2018, p. 230–231). She argues that Scheers’ emphasis on practices sheds light on how habituated and repeated bodily acts may mobilize certain emotions: “The learned feedback loop of caring for a child (…) seems to provide a better explanation for the centrality of mothers in Western child-rearing than any scientific explanation yet known about women's bodies or women's hormones” (Fetheringill Zwicker in: Davison et al., 2018, p. 231).

The perception of emotions as arising from emotional practices has proven to be highly fruitful in historiography on the emotions. However, it appears that the subsequent step of describing emotions not only as arising from practices but as practices themselves, confronts us with Reddy's problem of emotions once more. Following Bourdieu, Scheer argues that “the habitus is the precondition for subjectification” (2012, p. 206). Experiences, thus, exist only by virtue of this pre-existing habitus. It has been argued that ultimately, although Bourdieu aimed at finding a pathway between structuralism and phenomenology, subjective experience and action in his account were reduced, or are at least made secondary, to the incorporation of pre-existing structures (Shusterman, 1999, p. 6; Throop & Murphy, 2002, p. 192, 198). This begs the question of how new or different experiences can emerge in this framework. Pressed on a similar issue by Lisa Fetheringill-Zwicker, Scheer argued that “the body incapable of producing obligatory feelings can be the beginning of a process of redefining the ‘feeling game’” (Davison et al., 2018, p. 236). This, however, seems to reintroduce the body as an entity that is to some degree separate from the “feeling game:” the body sometimes needs to recalibrate with the habitus, and must therefore not coincide with it (see also: Scheer, 2012, p. 204). In order not to stay with a too constructivist, “rule-based theory,” (Gammerl et al., 2017, p. 89) or to reintroduce a kind of autonomous, ahistorical body, the character of this body-beyond-practices needs to be further clarified. In other words, to satisfy our second criterion, Scheer's embodied and practiced account needs to be supported by an account that truly allows for the friction between historical bodies and practices.

After Scheer, another embodied approach to the history of emotions and senses was proposed by Rob Boddice and Mark Smith. Boddice and Smith understand the human as a biocultural entity whose brain-body is inherently culturally formed, and whose culture is inherently determined by brain-bodies. It aims to link “a cultural plasticity to a neurological plasticity” (Boddice & Smith, 2020, p. 21). This approach builds on Daniel Lord Smails introduction of neurohistory, and his understanding of the brain as plastic and in constant reciprocal interaction with the environment (Smail, 2014a, 2014b). It contrasts, however, with the Bourdieuian view, as instead of viewing culture—in the form of practices—as constructive of (embodied) experiences, Boddice and Smith put the reciprocal relation between culture and body central stage: “it is not simply a case of culture writing to nature,” as “brains impact the conceptual field” (2020, p. 21). Furthermore, in contrast to Reddy's account of computation and representation as the link between the brain and culture, Smith and Boddice characterize this link as a one of “permeation” (2020, p. 35).

To explain this reciprocal and permeating character of biocultural experience, Boddice and Smith mostly draw from two theoretical frameworks. First, drawing on the work of psychiatrist and philosopher Thomas Fuchs, they argue that the brain is not an isolated program processing inputs and outputs, but a constantly changing organ whose processes are only meaningful when intertwined with a body and an environment. They put aside the concepts of “inputs” and “outputs” in favor of an understanding of a more “dynamic relation between brain-body and world” (Boddice & Smith, 2020, p. 35). Secondly, Boddice and Smith refer to the work of psychologist and neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett to argue that experience is a construction made by our brain to make sense of incoming sensations. To Barrett, the brain is a predictive classification computer that receives an enormous amount of unordered sense-data without having access to the causes of this data (Adolphs et al., 2019, p. 3). The brain then constructs “ad hoc concepts,” a kind of copy of the network or pattern of brain activity that was caused by the environment. Groups of these concepts together form categories that the brain uses to predict, and thereby make sense of subsequent incoming input (Barrett, 2006, pp. 30, 33, 2017b, p. 9; Adolphs et al., 2019, p. 3). These categories are its means to make sense of the world: “the brain constructs meaning by correctly anticipating (predicting and adjusting to) incoming sensations” (Barrett, 2017b, pp. 7, 9). Emotions, in this framework, are not inborn programs but abstract categories applied to otherwise meaningless patterns of brain activity. Barrett calls this “constant stream of transient alterations in an organism's neurophysiological state” the “core affect” (Barrett, 2006, pp. 21, 30, 34, 37; Barrett & Russell, 2015, p. 11). Core affect is ever present, does not pertain solely to emotions, and, most importantly, has “no intrinsic emotional meaning” (Adolphs et al., 2019, p. 6; Barrett, 2006, p. 36). It is not intentionally directed at, but caused by the environment. Thus, in this view, the meaningful experience of an emotion, and of its intentional directedness to the environment, are constructed by means of our brain's categorization of this core affect (Barrett, 2006, pp. 27, 36).

The understanding of experience as constructed by the brain satisfies our second criterion by seeing the mechanisms for constructing or categorizing emotions as inborn, but the categorizations themselves as formed by context: “learning (…) ‘hardwires’ a brain” (Barrett, 2006, p. 36; Barrett & Russell, 2015, pp. 49, 65, 66; Barrett et al., 2009, p. 433). Categorization is based on the concepts formed in previous situations, and is thus learnt according to the culture in which we grow up (Barrett, 2017b, p. 9, 2006, pp. 36, 38; Barrett et al., 2009, pp. 433–434). When Boddice and Smith understand “discourse, or more precisely discursive concepts, to have a material effect,” this is because discursive concepts structure the way brains make sense of the world and experiences it (2020, pp. 34, 36). It is in line with these insights that they argue for the replacement of the term “emotion” by “experience.” As opposed to the term “emotion,” which refers to a specific contemporary and local conceptualization of our core affect, “experience” can serve as an open heuristic concept to find historically situated conceptualizations or categories (Boddice & Smith, 2020, pp. 34, 36). They argue on the basis of Barrett's model that “concepts are formative of the meaning of affective experiences: they give those experiences their cultural and temporal particularity” (Boddice & Smith, 2020, p. 15). It is through this conceptual change that new experiences emerge (Boddice & Smith, 2020, pp. 11–12). In short, the conception of experience as bioculturally constructed is valuable for historians as it offers a neuroscientific basis for their thesis that the meaning of emotions is variable and context-dependent (Boddice, 2018, p. 145; Boddice, 2020, p. 131). When we have a closer look at the implications of the psychological constructivist model, however, two problems appear; it makes us lose sight of intentionality, and it reintroduces a strong form of linguistic constructivism. I will discuss both in the following passages.

To understand the first problem, we need to look into the relationship between the brain, the body, and the environment. For Barrett, as we have seen, since the brain is isolated from its environment, representations are crucial to any cognitive process; the brain can only make sense of the unordered and insignificant information it receives by means of predictive categories, or groups of representations. Furthermore, although in Barrett's account both brain and body are integrated in the processes of core affect, it is the brain that constructs the meaning of an emotion, whereas, as described by philosopher of cognition Giovanna Colombetti, “the body acts only as a transducer of information to the brain, that subsequently orders the body to move” (Colombetti, 2010, pp. 145, 153; Colombetti & Thompson, 2008, p. 55; Colombetti & Zavala, 2019, p. 4). This view, which Colombetti calls “corporeal impersonalism,” was taken up by Boddice in earlier work as well, where he argued that experience is not situated in physiological processes, as “bare physiology does not carry any meaning” (Boddice, 2018, p. 158; Colombetti, 2010, p. 153). It is the brain that imposes meaning by means of constructions: “(…) the experience of cold, pain and fear is created in the brain. These are translations of the value-free sensations of temperature and injury, and the sensations associated with the wound after injury” (Boddice, 2018, p. 147). In more recent work, however, Boddice moved away from this brain-centric model and has, as mentioned earlier, argued for the importance of models to include the body as constitutive of emotions. In doing so, he has increasingly aligned the biocultural approach to Fuchs’ work, to which I will now turn (Boddice, 2019a, pp. 318–320; Boddice & Hitzer, 2022, pp. 11–13).

In contrast with Barrett's psychological constructivist model, the enactivist framework used by Fuchs describes cognition not as a higher order reflection or categorization, but as the active engagement of a living, embodied organism with its environment. In this view, every living organism is cognitive by virtue of its organization as an autonomous and adaptive system (Colombetti, 2010, p. 148; Varela et al., 1993). It is autonomous in the sense of an operationally closed self-organizing system: all its different components work together to maintain the organism despite or by virtue of the environment (Colombetti, 2014, p. 55, 2009b, pp. 414–415). This does not mean, however, that the system is shut off from its environment. On the contrary, it is always engaging with the world as it needs certain elements of the environment to survive (Colombetti, 2017, p. 447; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007, p. 487). It is this continuous reciprocal or circular interaction with itself and the environment that brings forth the unity and continuity of the system, without ever being fully fixed (Colombetti, 2009b, p. 419). Besides being autonomous, living organisms are also adaptive, as they are capable of self-regulation in the face of changing environmental conditions (Colombetti, 2017, p. 447; Di Paolo, 2005). In order to adapt, the systems evaluate the world in degrees: some things are better for the organism, others worse (Colombetti, 2010, p. 149). Through this evaluative and self-preserving engagement with the environment, the autonomous and adaptive organism establishes itself as a unitary entity with a certain standpoint: “a perspective on the world with its own normativity” (Colombetti, 2014, p. 2, 2010, pp. 147–148; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007, p. 488). It is by virtue of this perspective that the world is given to an organism. It is never given neutrally or waiting to be interpreted by the brain, but always encountered as “directly meaningful” (Colombetti, 2010, p. 148, 2017, p. 448; Colombetti & Thompson, 2008, pp. 55–56; Prinz & Shargel, 2018, p. 117). This significant engagement with the environment is what enactivists view as cognition and call “sense-making:” the process in which “the physical world is transformed into a world of significance for the organism” (Colombetti, 2017, p. 448; De Jaegher, 2009, p. 538; De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007, p. 488). Meaning, thus, is not conceptually constructed, but emerges from the embodied engagement of an organism with its environment (Colombetti, 2010, p. 146). It is in this way that organisms achieve the intentional directedness that is lacking in “bare physiology” and in the computational mind.

Compared to the enactive framework, it appears that psychological constructivism, with its corporeal impersonalism and reliance on representations, is a strongly internalist model. Although it does account for the contextuality of experience within a biological framework—as the categories that shape experience are themselves context-dependent—it does so only by prioritizing the brain's internal mechanisms (see also: Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1173). This internalism can be found in Reddy's computational model of emotions as well but was already criticized by Scheer who referred to theories of extended cognition. Emotion in Scheer's pragmatist approach is fundamentally constituted by social and embodied practices, whereas to Barrett the construction of an emotion is a process internal to the brain, be that by means of previously socially learnt concepts. Most importantly, however, Barrett's internalism is at odds with Boddice and Smith's concept of “permeation” insofar as it is based on Fuchs’ understanding of the brain-body-world system. To Fuchs, although all kinds of internal processes go on inside our brains and bodies, and although those make interaction with the environment possible, they do not in themselves carry meaningful content (2018, p. 133). Instead of an organism representing its environment, the organism and environment enter into one dynamical system in which movement in one part resonates through and makes other parts move accordingly (Fuchs, 2018, p. 165). Boddice criticized the internalism of the constructivist position arguing: “It concerns sensory information and brain modeling, predictive coding and experience building, all within the confines of the body interior. Input, as far as input is a massive part of this research, is not really considered to the extent that input begins in the material, contextual world. Input only matters when the body begins its response to it” (Boddice, 2019b, p. 1996). In other words, although “bare physiology” may indeed not carry meaning, it appears that in a biocultural understanding of experience a “bare brain” cannot carry meaning either. That is to say, constructions made by the brain on the basis of a supposedly neutral sensory input, cannot carry meaning outside of context and embodiment. As was argued by Colombetti and Thompson, meaning is “created by, or enacted through, the continuous reciprocal interaction of the brain, the body, and the world” (Colombetti & Thompson, 2008, p. 56).

Besides its internalism and relative separation from context, a second worry arises when we take a closer look at the role of language in Barrett's version of psychological constructivism. Psychological constructivism, in her words, “is consistent with a strong version of linguistic relativity (Whorf, 1956) that is, that language forms the basis of experience. In the case of emotion, language shapes core affective phenomena into the emotional reality that we experience” (Barrett, 2006, p. 37). This strong version of psychological constructivism poses a problem for our understanding of emotive failure. Following this Whorfian relativism, if emotion-words would determine the emotions we have, then the inability to express certain emotions in words would simply mean that we cannot experience that emotion either. It would not lead to an experience of emotive failure. Conversely, as pointed out by Rob Boddice, the bioconstructivist view: “might suggest that if enough people come to believe there are six basic emotions that look a certain way then, by the power of neuroplasticity, they will become so” (Boddice, 2020, p. 126–133). Such a strong form of relativity is not necessary to psychological constructivism, but even if we accept a weaker reading, it is important to stress that Barrett's model gives a particularly central role to language (Barrett, 2006). In her Conceptual Act model of psychological constructivism, she emphasizes that although objects in the environment can cause arousal, a meaningful, cultural, emotion exists only by virtue of a language-driven categorization. Accordingly, if there is cultural variation in emotion experience, this is caused only by cultural variation in language: “There is cultural variation in the experience of emotion that is intrinsically driven by cultural differences in emotion categories and concepts” (Barrett, 2006, p. 39). As many of the historians discussed in this paper exemplify, however, historians have argued that we should not limit ourselves to language in the understanding of historical cultures of emotion. As Katy Barclay pointed out with regards to the failure to conform to changing feeling norms: “It is very tempting here to measure such failures to conform to emotional norms as a linguistic failure – the inability of language, and social structures built on language, to capture affect or the physical matter of the body. (…) Yet (…) this analysis is unsatisfactory” (Barclay, 2017, p. 176). In Barrett's view, the physical matter of the body and of the environment do play a role, but they do not play the same constitutive role as language does in the creation of emotions. This perspective obscures the ways in which the body and environment may, possibly even without the help of language or conceptualization, be constitutive of experience and of emotive failure as well.

This is not to say that language does not play an important role in the shaping of emotions. We do often categorize our feelings by means of concepts, and these concepts and categories will shape our experiences in some ways since the meanings of these concepts are already conventionally formed—as was argued by Tyler Burge on the socially external character of the meaning of language (Burge, 1979). Moreover, concepts will influence experiences because, as was described by Reddy, humans are influenced by categorization (see also: Colombetti, 2009c, pp. 16–17, 23). When I say I am angry, I might subsequently feel angrier. Or, following an example given by Barrett herself, when I am on a date, I might be inclined to reflect on whether I am feeling “something” for my interlocutor, and therefore be led to misjudge the symptoms of a starting flu with the sensations of a developing love interest (Barrett, 2017a, p. 111). All these examples, however, show that words influence experiences in important ways, but it does not follow from them that it is only, or even primarily, words that turn meaningless core affect into meaningful experience. I will argue in the following paragraphs that instead of focusing on the role of words, understanding non-linguistic aspects of the socio-material environment as constitutive of emotions significantly enriches descriptions of the experiences of historical actors and can help us to reconceive of emotive failure.

Biocultural Dynamics and Affective Scaffolding

This analysis of previous historiography shows that the two criteria proposed in the introduction remain desiderata for the study of the history of experience. Most of the methodologies proposed rely, at least in part, on constructivist or anti-intentionalist frameworks. It is important to emphasize “in part,” because most of the historians discussed here either combined these approaches with more dynamical or intentional understandings of cognition or gradually moved towards them. This trend is significant and might help to overcome some of the difficulties raised by the frameworks underlying their methods. Therefore, contributing to this trend, I propose to take seriously an approach to the emotions that already played a background role in the methodologies used by Scheer, Hunt, Boddice, Smith and others, but has not yet been completely fleshed out.

This approach is based on an enactive understanding of cognition. As we have seen, enactivism was a part of Boddice and Smith's biocultural approach, and corresponds to the call by Smail, Hunt and Scheer for including the material aspects of the brain-body without naturalizing experience (see also: Boddice, 2019a, 2019b, pp. 316, 318; Elizabeth Roberts-Pedersen, 2022, p. 3). In the following, I will argue that this approach allows us to strengthen the concepts of the emotive effect, of emotional practices and of biocultural experience. I build on Scheer's introduction of enactive cognition in the field of history, and on her emphasis on the mobilizing, naming, regulating, and communicating role of practices. However, instead of equating emotions with the habitus, I here follow the enactive understanding one step further to consider its view of the interaction between culture and embodied, subjective experiences. In short, I believe that what Reddy referred to as “the problem of emotions”—that they are both meaningful and embodied—can be alleviated by adopting the enactivist recasting of the mind-body problem as the body-body problem: the problem of the relation between our body as an organism in the world, and our body as subjectively, thus meaningfully, lived (Reddy, 2020, pp. 168, 174.; Thompson, 2005). Enactivism has been described as a “non-reductive naturalism” as it seeks to account for meaning-generating from within a biological account of cognition (De Jaegher & Di Paolo, 2007, p. 487). As we have seen, it grounds meaning not in either the brain, the body, or practices, but in the very relationship between a biological, corporeal, organism, and its environment. The corporeal, in this view, is always already meaningful.

The specific strand of enactivism that I propose to consider in historical research is Giovanna Colombetti's understanding of emotions. Emotions, to her, are not inborn brain mechanisms, nor discursive constructions, but self-organizing and dynamical forms of engagement with the environment (Colombetti, 2014, p. 69, 2009b, p. 415). These forms are culture-specific configurations of what she calls “primordial affectivity:” the fact that each organism, by virtue of its standpoint, is never indifferent to its environment. Thus, cognition, or sense-making, is always an affective process. Primordial affectivity is similar to the “core affect” we encountered in Barrett. Indeed, Colombetti and Barrett agree on the idea that a kind of basic affectivity underlies all cognition, thereby problematizing the distinction between emotion and cognition and allowing the historians’ shift from emotion to the broader concept of experience (Colombetti, 2009b, p. 420). There is, however, a significant difference between their perspectives. Whereas core affect is passively caused by the environment, primordial affectivity is intentional and always actively engaged with its environment. As we saw in the previous section, organisms according to the enactive model always bring forth a meaningful environment: “Evaluations arise in this organism in virtue of its embodied and situated character, and the whole situated organism carries meaning as such—not by way of some separate abstract cognitive-evaluative faculty” (Colombetti, 2010, p. 146). Thus, emotions to Colombetti are not interpretations of an otherwise indiscriminate core affect, but self-organizing configurations or patterns of primordial affectivity (Colombetti, 2014, pp. 76–77, 107). The brain does not need concepts to “construct” experience or perception (Colombetti, 2009c, 440–441). Rather, each experience changes our brains in such ways that it determines the possible perceptions we can subsequently have: “recurring configurations of external and internal stimuli are sedimented in complex patterns of neural activation readiness, which may then be actualised by appropriate situations in the environment” (Fuchs, 2018, p. 165). Thus, the brain and body become attuned to an environment, which is not, as in Barrett's account, initially neutral and indiscriminate, but already packed with meaningful cues, by virtue of our sedimented dispositions.

These meaningful cues are also known as “affordances;” a concept that is paramount to ecological psychology and points to the “inviting-to-action”-character of the environment (Gibson, 1979). In short, an affordance is an opportunity for action given by the environment in relation to one's physiology and skills (Chemero & Käufer, 2016, p. 61; Prinz & Shargel, 2018, p. 114). The doorknob affords many people living in contemporary societies to open the door, whereas it may afford standing on for a butterfly. A separate cognitive process is not needed to interpret the environment, as the environment is directly perceived as meaningful through affordances (Gallagher, 2008, p. 537). Our perception, informed by the practical knowledge of our body, immediately gives access to relevant aspects of the environment we are attuned to. Now although these affordances have mostly been discussed in the context of action, Colombetti proposes that affordances may afford evaluations as well. She argues that we encounter a “landscape of valued objects and events that invite to relate to them in different ways—not just motorically, but also psychologically as forces that ‘attract’ or ‘repel’ in an affective sense” (Colombetti, 2017, p. 451). Since affordances are always relational, they invite a certain evaluation not only by virtue of material properties of the environment, but also by virtue of our affective dispositions, and especially by virtue of the feedback effect between these two reciprocally engaging poles.

Although this understanding of emotions is based on a biological engagement with the environment, this does not mean that all human emotions relate directly to survival and maintenance. Indeed, the cognitive systems of humans and other animals are “underdetermined by metabolism” (Colombetti, 2017, p. 450). To explain how humans develop complex cognitive systems and affective structures such as present-day emotions, we can make use of the thesis of the scaffolded mind (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1157; see also Colombetti, 2020, p. 216; Clark, 1999). The mind in this view is scaffolded in the sense that it uses, and adapts itself to, elements of the environment—environmental niches—to support and enhance its cognitive abilities (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1157). This idea of environmental niches is akin to Smail's use of the term “niche” as the environment with which human beings co-evolve: they alter it and are altered by it. Indeed, Smail argues not only that human culture is inseparable from biology, but also that “there is no such thing as humanity without the material environment in which we lived and evolved” (2014a, 2014b, p. 115).

Environmental niches can also be affective. Affective states, according to Colombetti and Joel Krueger “involve the active manipulation of the world, and (…) this process leads to the existence of what we shall call affective niches: instances of organism-environment couplings (mutual influences) that enable the realization of specific affective states” (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1160; see also Colombetti, 2020, p. 216). Organisms manipulate and change their environment into affective niches that influence their emotional experiences. Such a coupling is self-organizing and self-sustaining but remains “open and context dependent” (Colombetti, 2014, p. 69). Indeed, Colombetti and Krueger argue that: “some affective niches are (…) built gradually over time, and their material and social dimensions slowly constrain one another over generations, leading to culturally and socially different affective experiences and modalities of conduct” (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1172).

This discussion of the theories of primordial affectivity and the scaffolded mind show that, contrary to the psychological constructivist model, Colombetti's approach to emotions can account for the phenomenology of embodied, intentional, and directly meaningful experience—the first criterion—without reducing it to a categorization of our brains. Moreover, emotions in this view are not inborn or unchangeable, but consist of stabilized patterns of coupling with the environment that are prone to change on phylogenetic, historical, or developmental timescales (Colombetti, 2009b, p. 420; Colombetti, 2014, pp. 70–71). Thus, enactivism also allows for an approach to emotions as both context-dependent and grounded in the principles of biological organization of an organism—thereby satisfying our second criterion. In the following, and last, section, I will explain how historians working on historical, situated experiences, can make use of this understanding of emotions in their research.

Affective Niches in Historical Research: Reciprocity, Transparency, and Socio-Material Emotives

The understanding of affectivity delineated above invites historians to look at the affective coupling between actors and their environment through the construction of affective niches. Experiences are not only embodied and dependent on practices, but they often emerge from repeated engagement with specific objects of the environment. They are not inborn, nor constructed by concepts, by the brain, or by discourse alone. Rather, they are constructed through the engagement between an actor, whose system is organized in such a way that it allows for subjective intentional experience, and different aspects of its environment. It is this co-constitution of experience that enables the high variability of complex emotional episodes (Colombetti, 2014, p. 70). In a way, looking at the interaction between actors and their environment is at the core of historical research. To guide further research on how this interaction shapes emotions, I believe that the enactive framework can help to make sense of two aspects: its reciprocal character, and its transparency.

I will begin by discussing its reciprocal character. Take, for instance, the way music today can be used to regulate emotions. Certain songs, albums or playlists, may, through repetitive use, help to achieve specific affective states—such as the courage to do a difficult task, or a certain kind of nostalgia while reminiscing on a lost love. Listening to these songs can regulate emotions or experiences even when one does not intend them to do so in this way at that moment (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1162). Although certain of such scaffolds may be strictly personal, others can be used by many different actors (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1161). On music streaming platforms, for instance, particularly specific experience-related playlists for widespread use abound, with telling titles such as “Wake Up Happy,” “Alone Again,” “Monday Motivation,” or even: “Walk Like A Badass.” Affective niches are characterized by this combination of an actor's active interference with the environment, and the environment affording them to act or feel a certain way.

This reciprocity between experiences and aspects of the environment is evocative of Reddy's emotive effect. Colombetti already referred to his work as an example of valuable research into the feedback effect of language on our emotions (2009a, p. 15). If we see words as material affective niches scaffolding our environment, and such niches as places “in which specific behaviors and experiences can thrive,” then the use of emotion words can induce new experiences or strengthen those already felt (Colombetti, 2009a, p. 13). This means that the enactive model allows for a nonrepresentational and non-internalist grounding for the emotive. It replaces the computational models of cognition on which Reddy's concept was originally based, and which could not, as shown in the first part of this paper, account for the intentional character of experience (Reddy, 2020, p. 175).

Besides offering a more fitting explanation for the workings of the emotive, the enactive framework allows us to expand Reddy's concept from verbal emotion expressions to non-verbal aspects of the environment. ¹⁰ Indeed, in efforts of emotional navigation, actors do not only enter into a reciprocal engagement with the words they use, but also with the other affective niches they are attuned to. These aspects can be objects, spaces, or practices, but also other persons. In direct interpersonal interactions and through reciprocal awareness, a person can become coupled to another in such a way that they develop “shared emotions:” emotions that are not necessarily the same, but that do co-constitute and regulate each other (Léon et al., 2019; Zahavi, 2015; see also Ahmed, 2004, pp. 10–11). Paying attention to the emergence of shared emotions in this sense represents a valuable new avenue for the study of collective experiences in history.

Thus, looking at the role of the coupling between actors and their environment allows historians of emotions to move beyond the restrictive focus on conceptual constructions, and towards a more diversified reconstruction of the rich landscapes of affordances that constitute the “contexts of possibilities” of experience. ¹¹ Here, an enactive approach to historical experiences meets with Sara Ahmed's reconceptualization of emotions, impressions and objects, and with Katie Barclay's discussion of New Materialism in emotions history (Ahmed, 2004; Barclay, 2017, pp. 178–181). Barclay invites historians to have a different perspective on objects in their source analysis by: “accounting for how physical bodies, buildings, fashion become implicated in producing meaning as objects, not simply as referents or symbols” (Barclay, 2017, p. 179). To Ahmed, “emotions are shaped by contact with objects”—including immaterial objects, such as memories, and other persons, and these objects “become sticky, or saturated with affect” (2004, p. 6, 11). Contact is understood as both an encounter with an object and an orientation towards it, an aboutness, which transforms both the object and ourselves: “emotions shape the very surfaces of bodies, which take shape through the repetition of actions over time (…)” (Ahmed, 2004, p. 4).

The transformative impressions of these sticky objects on the body bring us to a second aspect of affective niches that I believe to be of interest to historians: their transparency—and the breakdown of that transparency. When a person is coupled to an object, this object often becomes incorporated or entrenched in such a way into this persons embodied sense-making, that it gains a certain transparency (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1161). It is through this object that one is engaging with the environment. Take, for instance, the use of a hammer by a carpenter. By force of repetitive use, the hammer becomes entrenched in their corporeal schema. They relate to their building project not by consciously reflecting on the hammer, just like they do not consciously reflect on their skills or moving body (Smail, 2014a, 2014b, p. 115). Rather, it is through their skills, their body, and the hammer that they engage with the object they are working on. Similarly, the affective niches people create become transparent as their body and habits become adapted to their use (Cuffari et al., 2015, p. 1116). I do not necessarily need to reflect on the piece of music I am listening to in order to feel comforted by it. My brain-body system has adapted to this aspect of my environment as I grew attuned to it, and it thus became a transparent part of the way I engage with the rest of the world.

The character of transparency is all-pervasive in the contact between actors and their environment. It marks their engagement with language and their capacity to switch seamlessly between the different affective styles asked for in different situations (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1170; Cuffari et al., 2015, p. 1116). In those styles you are most comfortable, those niches you have most closely incorporated, you do not need to actively reflect on that behavior to behave appropriately. This all-pervasive transparency, however, becomes even more interesting in the situations in which it breaks down: the situations in which the transparency of affective niches “is compromised or missing altogether” (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1170). If a certain affective niche was a means to experiencing a specific experience, the lack of that niche can lead to a lack of that experience. These moments, in which either an affective niche no longer “works,” or in which it has become inaccessible, are akin to what Reddy called emotive failure.

Following the enactive framework, I propose to understand emotive failure not as the result of computational failure, but as the result of a disruption of the attuned relation to the environment. Emotive suffering occurs not only when one is not allowed to verbally express certain experiences in a certain way, but also when one is not allowed to attune to those aspects of the environment that afford the specific experience aimed at. For instance, when someone loses a cherished object that used to bring a sense of belonging, or when certain objects (a song that brings courage, a religious symbol that brings consolation, etc.) are looked down upon or forbidden in certain spaces. These are situations in which the affective niches one is attuned to are absent, or in which they do not afford the appropriate experiences. The transparent use of affective niches may in those cases break down and one might be called to consciously reflect on them, or at any rate to recalibrate to the new situation.

Instead of asking the dead-end question of whether an actor either had “agency” over their experiences, or was passively determined by them, taking the enactive biocultural perspective on experience invites us to reimagine the way in which we understand stability and change. There is no longer a biological unchanging basis, nor can there be a complete, but changeable, determination by culture. Rather, stabilized discourses are shaped and pressured by embodied experiences that are constantly transgressing the limits of what can be said—for instance when available categories seem unfit for the diagnosis of an experienced disease (Boddice & Hitzer, 2022, pp. 17–18)—and reversely, stabilized embodied experiences are constantly resisting changes of discourse. If embodied experiences are not determined by discourse alone, but by the interplay of a living organism with its linguistic, social and material environment, this means that changes in discourse or concepts alone will not directly lead to an equal change in experience. Thus, the enactive constitution of meaningful subjective perspectives may further our understanding of what Lynn Hunt called meaningful but nonetheless “real” selves, as selves that are inseparable of discourse but simultaneously resist it (Burman, 2014, p. 81; Hunt, 2009, p. 673; Hunt, 2014). Paying attention to the way in which historical actors engage not only with concepts but also with objects, practices and other persons, may yield new insights in the ways actors maintain existing experiences or shape new ones—even in defiance of dominant concepts.