Emotionality: A Brief Introduction

Katrin Pahl

The field of emotion studies is growing without an agreement on terminology. This issue of MLN proposes emotionality as the appropriate term of art for several reasons. While emotion designates a particular feeling that somebody has, emotionality refers to a quality or a potential. This difference has several implications. Emotionality, like rationality, can be a characteristic of non-human processes or entities. We have no great problems speaking of an emotional encounter, an emotional decision, an emotional space, an emotional film, and the likeeven if we still feel compelled to project a human subject as the source or recipient of these emotional experiences. Several contributions to this issue will interrogate this compulsion. Emotionality is the (often latent) ability to be emotional, whereas emotions are specific manifestations of emotionality. Scholars of emotion characteristically produce lists of emotions and focus on a few items on that list. While we can certainly learn from these descriptions and analyses of individual emotions, such studies often obscure the fact that emotions easily transform from one into the other. Without a change in the fundamental situation, fear might give rise to anger, which might turn into a sadness that gives way to pleasure. This shows, in my view, that individual emotions are different interpretations and evaluations of a given emotional text. The interpretations change easily because with emotionality we are moving in the realm of difference; something is emotional when it registers and dynamically responds
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to its incongruence with itself. To focus on emotionality, instead of emotions, will help us to analyze these texts as such without getting too distracted by their assessments. Emotionality might be the least reifying word available. When we create a taxonomy of emotions, their object status is established before the analysis has even begun. To avoid the violence of reification, it might be a good idea to adopt an attitude of critical ethnography and speak nearby rather than about the emotional idiom.1 Broadcast on the right wave lengths, emotionality sounds like a proper namea female name, to be sure. While one would not wish it for any girl out there that Emotionality joined the ranks of female names such as Verity, Felicity, or Trinity, there is reason to appreciate the agency and subject status that the proper name confers upon the experience. Emotionality is self-experience, and by that I mean, Emotionalitys experience of itself. No human or bourgeois subject is necessary for this experience to take place; in fact, Rei Terada has convincingly argued that such subject gets in the way of the experience.2 Of course, this personification of emotionality runs the risk of perpetuating the traditional alignment of emotionality with femininity. It might buttress the division of labor that puts the burden of emotionality on real women and precludes real men from sharing its pleasures. The best strategy, in my view, to meet this danger is to suspend such gender categories as much as possible without denying the reality of women and menwhich is to say that I prefer the company of female characters such as Emotionality. Emotionality has the advantage of unprestigious, even negative undertones. For quite obvious political reasons, many of us are wary of investments in strong or even vehement passions.3 Even though, at its root, the term passion vacillates fruitfully between passivity and activity, common parlance has introduced a split between the two by either inflating the passionate subject to omnipotence or making him a slave to passion. While the rhetorical tradition offers the dynamic of self-affectation, which some contributors to this issue put to good use, the term affect feels somewhat suspicious in its neutrality. It is almost too easy to speak of affectas if, by using this term, one had
1 I am referring here to an ethnographic technique developed by Trinh Minh-ha in her film Reassemblage. See also Trinh T. Minh-ha with Nancy Chen, Speaking Nearby, in Trinh T. Minh-ha, Cinema Interval (London: Routledge, 1999) 20925; esp. 218. 2 Rei Terada, Feelings in Theory: Emotion after the Death of the Subject (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2001). 3 See Philip Fisher, The Vehement Passions (Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2002).

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cleansed all the embarrassment and messiness from the experience. To use affect in the sense defined by Deleuze and Guattari, that is, as non-conscious and non-linguistic experience of intensity, appears not to be useful if one wants to explore the overlap of rationality and emotionality, as well as insist on the textual and self-reflexivethat is, self-augmenting and self-attenuatingcharacter of emotionality. History Jutta Eming opens the issue with an analysis of medieval emotionality. She demonstrates that Gottfried von Straburgs Tristan, like other medieval texts, situates emotions not only in the psyche of the characters, but also in the visible body. Her article, On Stage: Ritualized Emotions and Theatricality in Isoldes Trial, explores communal strategies of authenticating emotions. Using the body as a stage, emotions need to be brought before the eyes and ears of others through ritualized patterns and stylized embodiments. Emphasizing the conventional and ritual aspects of medieval emotionality, Eming not only counters the developmental view of history that considers the emotional expressivity of medieval people as a sign of their primitive or childlike nature, but also argues that medieval literature simply highlights what is generally the case, namely that emotions are culturally conditioned and theatrical patterns of communication, rather than nature-like forces. Jutta Emings contribution to this issue of the Modern Language Notes shows us with great clarity that interiority is a specifically modern phenomenon and that the struggle to authenticate feelings through introspection and honest self-assessment, and then, in a second step, to translate such inner truth into commonly intelligible expressions, is not an ageless conundrum. Against the backdrop of an already established model of interiority, Kant might have re-introduced a sense for the intersubjectivity of feelingas Michael Taylor arguesbut Jutta Eming reminds us that in medieval culture it was understood that emotions play themselves out in space and time and in social interactions. While the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of interiority and authenticity that Michael Fried has championed so influentially with his theory of absorption, Michael Thomas Taylor locates the first, and surprisingly early, critique of this model in Kants philosophical aesthetics. Critical Absorption: Kants Theory of Taste explores whether it makes sense to describe the activity of the mindbe it the free play of the faculties or the I think and what it accompaniesas a strictly interior movement. In addition to Kants outer sense of space

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and inner sense of time, which are both infinitely teilbar, Taylor finds another sense in Kant: the sense of voice (Stimme), which bridges the inner and the outer by being infinitely mitteilbar. Contributing to Stimmung and conceptual Bestimmung, this sense links together rationality and emotionality while the claim to universal communicability of aesthetic judgments renders subjectivity constitutively intersubjective and therefore neither securely unified nor purely interior. The next article in this section attends to the self-reflexivity of emotion or to what some have described as the self-irony of emotion. While Sianne Ngai has argued that a particular group of emotions she calls them ugly feelingshave a special relationship to irony, it seems to me that it is rather a certain understanding of emotion that brings the self-ironic quality of emotionality to the fore.4 This irony ruins in particular the figure of the heartwhich was at the peak of its currency in the eighteenth centuryand lets self-critical hearts emerge that embrace brokenheartedness or lightheartedness. In Adornos Tears: Textures of Philosophical Emotionality, Annika Thiem considers emotionality as a driving force for critical thought. She relies on Benjamins distinction between Eingedenken and Einfhlung when she identifies the emotional disposition of Adornos philosophy as one of Eingedenken. This distinction helps her to make a case for brokenheartedness, as it werethat is, for emotionalitys inherent self-reflexivity. Einfhlung as well as Kitsch and philosophical jargon, all in their own way, fortify the subject through an appeal to emotion that insulates from critique. Meanwhile, Adornos critical philosophy longs for a fragile or restless reconciliation of thought and world that remains traversed by philosophys brokenheartedness; it longs for a proximity that doesnt cancel differences. Thiem offers a convincing ethical argument why it is important not to displace the impersonal emotionality of thought onto the human subject, or, in her own words, not to shrink the emotionality of the (philosophical) text to that of the reader or writer. Subjects of Emotionality In a rather unexamined way we presume that emotionality is an index of subjectivity and that emotions are only felt by the human self. Against this assumption, Terada has demonstrated that we would have no
4

Sinna Ngai, Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2005) 10.

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emotions if we were subjects (4). While the third section of this issue, Impersonal Passion, will move beyond the compulsion to attribute emotions to humans (and instead explore the emotionality of language, of grammar, of texts), this section interrogates what subjectivity might mean after the death of the subjectthat is, after the idea of the autonomous and unified bourgeois subject has been largely eroded, if not abandoned. Subjects of Emotionality asks what it is in the structure of post-subjective subjects that enables emotionality. After Terada has clarified that emotion is the experience of selfdifferentiality, Mrton Dornbach here interrogates the notion of the individual, which, strictly speaking, means indivisible. He determines that the mathematical equivalent of the individual cannot be the number one, since it is divisible, but must be the extensionless mathematical point, and finds the most radical articulation of this punctual notion of the subject in Kants transcendental philosophy. The Point Well Missed: Kants Punctual I and Schopenhauers Optics of Philosophical Writing traces how even a philosopher who attempts to stay true to the Kantian analogylike Schopenhauermust get entangled in a web of mixed metaphors shifting from the mathematical to the geometrical to the ocular point, to organic unity, and finally to a technical device correcting blurry optics in order to properly capture the idea of the punctual I, which turns out to be divided and refracted after all. The result is the potentially emotional textuality of a philosophical autobiography of errors. Weaving in and out of Kleists and Woolfs voices, receiving its sources of existence from these and other alien hands, Eva Meyers contribution, And Time, makes a case for understanding the person as a moving permeation of differents. While language might constitute us as subjects, Meyer attends to the ways in which our ability to alternate between language and different speeches, different perspectives, different idioms, makes the subject fall into time as if into the floating boundary between the interior and the exterior. This might just free us from dead-ending in a single consciousness; suddenly it becomes easy to switch times, transform characters from one into the other, and reverse the relation between people and words. Meyer explores the syntax and thinking style of free indirect discourse, and throws into relief how thinking with and in fellow beings generates an emotionality that she describes as the exciting moment that triggers movements as well as the resistance that gives the movements coherence and prevents them from going round in circles with manic ease. This emotionality does not spring from an inner monologue

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that shuffles feelings, sensations, thoughts, images, and memories, nor quite from the intersubjective openness of consciousness, but from the logic, the automatism, perhaps even the intention of the conjunction and. Thus, And Time begins to demonstrate how translinguality supports emotionality. Impersonal Passion Emotionality registers self-incongruence. The previous section clarifies that we are indeed textsself-differential entitieswho as such, and only as such, can feel. This section turns more specifically to the emotionality of texts, language, twists of speech, syntax, and words that enact and produce feelings, rather than simply and obediently conveying them as we elect. To defer to Denise Rileys words, the articles in this section might be said to trace languages affect as that outward unconscious which hovers between people, rather than swimming upward from the privacy of each heart.5 Unconscious it is certainly not to itself, and less and less to us, when we follow these accounts in recognizing the capacity of that outward emotionality for self-reflection. While Meyer explores how free indirect discourse generates a nonsynthetic and therefore emotional self, Jan Mieszkowski focuses on another trope that disobeys conventional syntax, the anacoluthon (an interruption and change in the grammar of a sentence). He analyzes the anacoluthonic logic of Gottfried Benns poem Requiem, and maintains that the reason why this poem has been alternatively critiqued for its coldness and its pathos lies in the fact that Benn does not consistently apply one conception of linguistic affection (Expressionist or Naturalist), but interrupts one with the other. In Whos Afraid of Anacoluthon?, anacoluthon serves to exemplify the emotionality of language in general. Against conventional investments in the mono-logical character of syntax, Mieszkowski argues that language is constitutively incapable of creating a truly monolithic organizing schema. Following a logic of self-affection, which he derives from Kant, Mieszkowski demonstrates that, because any instantiation of language must relate to itself as something other than what it presents itself to be, the sentence is never at peace with itself, but intrinsically emotional. In Forging Feeling: Kleists Theatrical Theory of Re-layed Emotionality, I analyze how Kleist meets the violence of interiority with strategies
5

Denise Riley, Impersonal Passion: Language as Affect (Durham: Duke UP, 2005) 4.

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of (self-)disintegration that parallel the extroverting and literalizing strategies of Hegels semiology. In a confounding move against purity, integrity, and consistency, Kleist explores the overlaps of theater and narrative, mimesis and rhetoric, body and word, and the acts of observing and producing feelings. By presenting these overlaps, he brings out the incongruence of selves and events with themselves and generates relays of emotion. This layered emotionalitywhich I find in Kleists Amphitryon, Penthesilea, and Das Kthchen von Heilbronn has as much the effect of amplifying emotional experiences as of flattening them into something ongoing and repetitive. Forging Feeling is less interested in the dramatic grandeur of death, authentic experience, kairotic time and enigmatic subjectivity than in something as odd and confusing as homo-reference. Revaluating Ugly Feelings If much of this issue attends to the overlap of emotionality and rationality, this should not be taken as proof or even postulate that emotionality serves reason or that it is always cognitively, morally, or politically judicious. On the contrary, most of it is an invitation to reason to bend, leap, and doublespeak at the impressive and confounding level of emotion. To emphasize this even further, the last section offers a phenomenology of concrete affects. By attending to their subtle particularities, it demonstrates that emotionality indeed generates its own values, as Charles Altieri has suggested, and that these are values that, with the means of sanity and common sense, can be very difficult to grasp.6 With his piece on contemporary German experimental filmmaker Michael Brynntrup, Randall Halle contributes to the recent debate on gay shame as a more politically moving alternative to gay pride. Toward a Phenomenology of Emotion in Film: Michael Brynntrup and The Face of Gay Shame begins with a brief mapping of the intersection of film studies and cognitive science. Halle argues that Brynntrups moving images are apt to contribute to cognitive research, thereby for once changing the direction of influence between the two fields. They do so by countering the focus on processes in the brainwhich Halle sees as a remnant of the fundamental and problematic presumption of interioritywith a phenomenological approach that interweaves
6 See Charles Altieri, The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of the Affects (Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 2004).

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the exterior and the interior in a rich web of images. Through an analysis of Herzsofort.Setzung, All You Can Eat, Loverfilm, and Face It!, Halle not only indicates that Brynntrups works shame the spectators, but also explores the theoretical, philosophical, and political effects of this revaluating return to gay shame. In her discussion of the East-German psyche, Unfulfillable Wishing: Depression in the Gray Zone, Erin Trapp argues for a shift away from the expression-against-repression model and instead discovers the resources of depression. She shows depression to have a logic of its own, characterized by minor shifts and imperceptible rearrangements, rather than the stark contrast between freedom and unfreedom. Discussing in tandem the poetry of Durs Grnbein and the psychoanalytical theories of Edith Jacobson and D. W. Winnicott, Trapp suggests that the common call for expression (especially in the face of repression) and the understandable demand for visible change toward the better might have their own dictatorial aspect to them, one that can be countered by a healthy depression. I am grateful to the editorial assistants, Florentina Costache and Eberhard Froehlich, for their thorough and responsible preparation of the documents for publication. Special thanks go to Myrta Byrum of the Johns Hopkins Press for smoothing the way from preparation to production.