@EmotionalObjects and a Philosophy of the History of Emotions

Firstly, I am aware that I said I'd write everyday, but this has proven to be difficult. I never get anything finished in 30 mins, so instead I'm going to aim for weekly, as a collection of the 30 mins.

Now that's out of the way, lets continue shall we!

In London Liverpool Street station stands an unregarded statue dedicated to the many Jewish children rescued from mainland Germany during the Second World War. This statue commemorates a moment of extreme emotional outpouring in our recent past; a moment that should not be forgotten. But judging by the mounds of litter covering the statue, not to mention the oblivious zombies rushing past in their thousands each hour, it would appear that it has been. This is not a criticism; I was one of those zombies until by chance I happened to sit on the object while waiting at the station for my wife. That moment of pause allowed me to actually stop and look, and this is likely as much a reason for neglect as any other. The pause got me thinking about changes in meaning over time, transference, sympathetic magic, and how the essential nature of the emotions attached to objects weakens and changes from person to person; time to time; generation to generation. It is the last of these that I'd like to talk about here.

'Das' Kind', statue commemorating rescued
Jewish Children from WW2

Last friday, I attended day one of a fascinating conference: emotional objects. Talks ranged from the emotional importance of apples to the feeling engendered by the cleanliness of household surfaces - particularly, when does the surfeit and the over-polished lead to anxiety [or disgust?]. One recurring theme struck me. As the objects mentioned by the speakers travelled through time, the emotions associated with them changed. Widows would feel differently to their deceased husbands, children to their parents, even we, as academics, imprint our own set of emotional sympathies upon the object. This leads to a problematic relationship between object and researcher, and one that reminds me of the work of Catherine Lutz.

In Unnatural Emotions, Lutz postulated three constructional elements to emotions. 

The first construction is 'the local theories of emotions': geographical or temporal understandings of what emotions are, the language used to describe them and the roles they and the cultural artefacts (rituals, beliefs, assumptions etc) surrounding them. In the case of material cultures, this would be what the object meant to the people at the time under scrutiny. This may be the intentions of the original creator or buyer of the object, or how the object was understood later. A dinosaur bone or a mountain would have a very different emotional meaning to someone from the 10th and the 20th centuries, for example. 

This is perhaps the hardest part to discover. It involves what Michael Baxandall called 'The Period Eye'. Baxandall suggested that it is probably true that in all sighted human beings certain frequencies of light hit the eye and are then converted to electrical impulses and fed into the brain in the same way. After this point, however, they are filtered though culture, and there is scientific evidence for this. Professor Jay Neitz, for example, has run a number of studies that suggests that both humans and non-human primates can see colours very differently depending on upbringing and circumstance. His findings are quite extraordinary to the point that my red may be your blue. 

Outside the synthetic world of the laboratory, the Himba Tribe of northern Nambia do not differentiate green and blue, but they do see many shades of green that we do not. Tested using something like the chart below, the people of the Himba had different names for each square, while to most of us, it is one shade of green repeated twelve times.

How many greens do you see?

To Baxandall it goes deeper than the mechanics of colour. The Himba see many greens due to their jungle environment in which knowing one green from another allows them to know which tree is which, what to eat from, where they are and so on. Not something we city dwellers rely on so much. The green has an important cultural meaning. Deeper still, the shapes and the images themselves matter. To take one simple example, two lines, one shorter than the other, drawn across each other at 90 degrees with the shorter one crossing the longer one just above centre means (or I suspect meant) nothing to the Himba, but it means a great deal to a Catholic. To Baxandall, then, the pursuit of art history, or visual cultures, is more than just a critique and an understanding of the materials used. It involves an attempt to get into the head of the people viewing and creating the art in historical context; viewing through 'the period eye'. This, of course, can get quite complicated and goes beyond art. Objects carry similar emotional and cultural symbolism, and this has to be understood by trying to get into the mind of the period. 

The second construction is that brought about by 'foreign observers and their emotional theories'. To understand the period eye at an emotional level, there is an extra level to be negotiated. We have our own idea of what emotions are, an idea that is hard to get around. The number of times I have heard words like 'anxious' and 'disgust' applied to periods when not only did the words either not exist or have a very different meaning, but it is not at all certain that what we think of as anxiety and disgust existed, is almost incalculable. 

Anxiety, for example, is a word that was used by James Strachey in his translation of Sigmund Freud's 1895 paper, 'On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description "Anxiety Neurosis"' (I know, seriously snappy title). It was used to translate the German word 'angst', and Strachey himself said that Angst may 'be translated by any one of half a dozen similarly common English words - fear, fright, alarm, and so on - and it is therefore quite impractical to fix on some simple English term as its sole translation', but sole translation it became. If anxiety was all but invented whole cloth in 1895, is it right to use it on the feelings of a twelfth-century Crusader before battle, or are we imposing our own feelings upon him?

It is here that I suggest something along the lines of the period eye, what I like to call 'the period feeling'. Disability aside, all people see colour and all people have the capacity to learn language, but what colours they see, and what language they learn, depends on culture. Similarly, all humans have an amygdala, neurotransmitters, and a central nervous system that allow them to feel internal sensations triggered by external sensory stimulus, memories, or their imagination. But how we perceive these feelings, what we feel and what it means, depends on culture.  Some feelings will perhaps trigger a sudden physical reaction free from culture, in much the way a very bright light will make all humans squint or close their eyes, but for the most part these are neurological affects, not what I understand by the term 'emotion'. Just as a bright light is not really a colour, and certainly isn't art (although I'm sure the Tate modern would make room for it).

So how do we do this? Perhaps the best way is through translation. At the end of the day, we only have our words from our language and culture to go on as we attempt to describe the period eye or the period feeling. In fact all history is, in essence, an attempt to translate the past into the present. So anxiety might be the right word to use for how a Crusader Knight described his feelings if it is the closest word we have for that feeling. If it assists ourselves and a modern readership to get some way into the head of the Knight, so be it. Just don't say that the emotion he was feeling was actually anxiety, and that he understood it as such, because it almost certainly wasn't.

This, of course, can also be applied to objects much like art by understanding, a. what the emotional landscape/community/regime etc. of the period and culture you are looking at and b. by understanding the symbolism contained in the object. It has to be stressed that the translation can never be perfect, but it should be as close as it can be.

The third of Lutz's constructions is 'Culture and Ideology in Academic Emotional theory'. This is important; academic cultures can cause havoc. Take the same object to a psychologist, anthropologist, cultural theorist, social scientist, and a historian and you'll get five different explanations from five different methodological paradigms. I myself have my own methodological paradigm and though I like to think I try to stay above academic cultures's latest fad, I am not immune.

One way around this is to examine with a similar eye to a philosopher of science. Examine your areas' accepted methods, see if they are the only way to go, or just the latest in a string of ideas about the subject. Be aware of the cultural construction of your discipline and look at what you are doing from a number of methodological angles.

I also suggest going one further. If I have one gripe with the philosophy of science is that it rarely turns its critical powers upon itself. So I endeavour not only to examine the paradigms of the areas of emotion research I engage in, but the cultural construction of the philosophy itself. For example, the philosophy of science is, right now, very critical of scientific approaches and particularly the language used by scientists. A throwaway 'scientific methods' causes great consternation on Twitter feeds and a distrust of science itself seems to be at the centre of the discipline. Importantly, this is itself a paradigm. The philosophy, and the sociology (perhaps more so) of science have this stance because at this moment, the theories of deconstructionists like Derrida and, more commonly, Foucault hold sway over their discipline. If they had been around 50 years ago, the Logical Positivism of people such as A. J. Ayer would have been accepted with as little question by the same people; because that was the paradigm, the excepted intellectual culture, then.

In my opinion, it is important to treat these 'meta-paradigms' in the same way as the paradigms of emotion research, and try many on for size. At the end of the day, the one you go with is unlikely to yield an exact truth, but so long as something close enough to the truth to stand up to scrutiny by those of other intellectual paradigms and meta-paradigms is produced, that is fine.

[Oh dear, I sound almost like a postmodernist. Not really, more a Poperian. I am well aware of the problems of induction and logical positivism, but I am also aware that without the ability to accept that certain levels of evidence are enough, no one would ever be convicted of any crime. That doesn't mean that jurisprudence should be left to stagnate, however.]

So where does this leave us? It leaves us looking at a statue in Liverpool Street Station and wondering what the emotions that triggered the construction of such an object were? What did it mean to those who commissioned, designed, and installed it? Who were these people? Why did they do what they do? What link do they have to the Jewish children of the first world war? What material is it made out of? Why that material? How much did it cost? Who paid for it? and so on. 

This in turn tells me something else about Emotional Objects. You cannot understand Emotional Objects by staring at the objects themselves. The objects can tell you a lot, but only after a whole raft of other questions have been answered, and with Emotional Objects, there are many more questions than there would be in trying to understand the history of the object alone.

References (in no particular order - hey, it's a blog!)

Catherine Lutz, Unnatural Emotions (University of Chicago Press, 1988)

Michael Baxandall, Painting and Experience in Fifteenth-Century Italy (Oxford university Press, 1972)

Michael Baxandall, Patterns of Intention (Yale university Press, 1985)

BBC Horizon: Do you see what I see? "The Himba Tribe"

For a list of Jay Neitz's papers, see http://scholar.google.co.uk/citations?user=HY84TwUAAAAJ&hl=en

Daniel Freeman & Jason Freeman, Anxiety, A Very Short Introduction (Oxford university Press, 2012)

Sigmund Freud's 1895 paper, 'On the Grounds for Detaching a Particular Syndrome from Neurasthenia under the Description "Anxiety Neurosis"' (online verision, accessed 15/10/2013) see ftp: //ftp.lutecium.org/pub/Freud/pdf/1895_on_the_grounds_for_detaching_a_particular_syndrome_from_neurasthenia_under_the_description_%E2%80%98anxiety.pdf