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Unfelt: The Language of Affect in the British Enlightenment

2021; Duke University Press; Volume: 82; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00267929-9366009

1527-1943

Michael B. Prince,

Historical Economic and Social Studies

Affect theory is all the rage of late. James Noggle’s Unfelt offers both genealogy and endorsement. As genealogy, it locates the origin of affect in an intractable problem that extends across genders, genres, and disciplines. As endorsement, it uses the terms and methods of affect theory to understand its past. Ingeniously, but also riskily, Noggle frames Unfelt as the history of an adverb, insensibly, used “to describe what could look, if described broadly and roughly enough, like the basic components of the ideology of modern Western liberalism” (192). As a mere adverb grows into an idiom and from there into an ideological force, so the chapters expand in scope, demonstrating “the consistency of the insensible as an idiom across a broad range” (18). Chapter 1 focuses on “minute particles that precede all sensory experience” in English and French empiricism (114); chapter 2 treats “the social zone of the courtship novel where insensible processes play out between a heroine and the watchful men and families converging on her” (114); chapter 3 addresses history writing, in which “the insensible performs its effects at their most vast” (115), offering “a sensitive membrane on which impersonal time imprints patterns of human feeling” (125). Finally, chapter 4 and the epilogue trace affect’s reach into international commerce and liberalism, arguing that the insensible “articulates the manner in which jarring, selfish economic passions may result in a general happiness” (156). In Unfelt the insensible works with the power previously accorded to Geist in the history of ideas. “In every context the idiom characterizes something happening prepersonally, in advance of any feeling owned by the people affected by it. This prepersonal implication operates equally at every part of this scale” (114). By the conclusion Noggle’s adverb has amassed surprising powers: “The idiom of the unfelt enables writers to construct four basic formations—the free subject, disciplined feminine desire, progress, the self-optimizing economy—that the ideology of modernity has commonly been seen to comprise” (192).Favorite terms and methods of affect theory energize the account. If contemporary “affect theory draws its keywords at least as much from the history of philosophy, dating back to the early Enlightenment, as from the new neuroscientific developments” (49), then the converse must also be true: these same keywords reveal the secret—or, using the term that Noggle adopts from Brian Massumi, the “prepersonal”—history of the Enlightenment. Noggle draws heavily on the introduction and essays of The Affect Theory Reader, whose editors describe Unfelt’s methodology: Because affect emerges out of muddy, unmediated relatedness and not in some dialectical reconciliation of cleanly oppositional elements or primary units, it makes easy compartmentalisms give way to thresholds and tensions, blends and blurs. As Brian Massumi has emphasized, approaches to affect would feel a great deal less like a free fall if our most familiar modes of inquiry had begun with movement rather than stasis, with process always under way rather than position taken. (Gregg and Seigworth 2010: 4)Noggle agrees, abandoning more familiar techniques, such as examining a sufficient sample of historical uses of his key term, and adopting instead Deleuzian procedures announced at several points along the way. “I am arguing that a seemingly casual idiom, which may at first glance seem like little more than a tic in Enlightenment prose style, acts like a concept, with specific content” (5). But as a concept, it begins to look too predictable, too much like some static “middle position occupied by the insensible” (63). So Noggle swaps metaphors again: in Condillac “the term insensibly gestures to a kind of lubricant in consciousness that allows us to single out one thing as we allow others to recede” (53). On occasion he acknowledges the many uses to which insensibly has been put, including uses that oppose his preferred meaning. However, contrary uses only prove the hidden power of the idiom: “The ideological construction of ‘the modern subject,’ then, its self-transparency and conscious freedoms, relies on a productive, affective blank” (192). At which point, one is likely to agree with Noggle’s assessment of his own work: “What I offer here is something like a conceptual history without a concept” (9).In the opening sections of the book, Noggle describes how insensibly acquired such authority. To some extent, it has done so affectedly: “The term performs as a character actor who always seems to be on hand, a little off to one side in movie after movie, passing the scalpel or the handkerchief to the stars when they have their dramatic scenes” (67). But, more pointedly, it has gained this power through Noggle’s rereading of the sequence of empirical philosophers starting with Locke, bypassing Berkeley (whose argument about the emotive force of language should be of interest to affect theorists), and downplaying Shaftesbury and Hutcheson, the moral sense philosophers prior to Adam Smith who energized the discourse of sensibility. The account zips from Locke, to the problem of consciousness in Hume and Condillac, to David Hartley, where the embarrassments of empiricism are on full display, and if you ever wondered why the Romantic poet Coleridge named his son after the arch-empiricist Hartley, Unfelt’s your answer.Noggle views recourse to insensibly in Locke, Hume, and Hartley as momentous for the Enlightenment generally. He catches the modern empiricists reaching for a term that undermines their first principle, that knowledge derives from sense. The discussion of Locke homes in on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities in book 2, chapter 8, of the Essay concerning Human Understanding. The problem is the classic one of division in empirical method, a.k.a. the problem of induction, a.k.a. the paradox of empiricism. “Take a grain of Wheat,” Locke writes, “divide it into two parts, each part has still Solidity, Extension, Figure, and Mobility; divide it again, and it retains still the same qualities; and so divide it on, till the parts become insensible, they must retain still each of them all those qualities” (quoted in Noggle, 29). Insensible, the toss-off term in the philosopher’s explanation of how identity survives differentiation, is self-contradictory. Noggle uses the supplement to deconstruct the binary: “The insensible, however, has the odd distinction of pointing out how primary and secondary qualities not only differ but also turn out to be the same. . . . With the word insensible, to put it more broadly, the opposition between world and mind, outside and inside, starts to break down” (30). On its way down it meets another empirical philosopher, also a Christian, who tried to become the first neuroscientist, describing what Locke could only hint at—a real account of how the brain’s sensory inlets produce knowledge in the mind. Hartley knows that whatever produces ideas must be exceedingly small and fast; he also knows that he lacks the instruments and the language to state what occurs factually as a matter of empirical observation. So he goes poetic, reaching for metaphors of insensible process to carry him over the modern-day dividing line. Writing as if this same problem had now been solved by our superior cognitive neurosciences, Noggle pokes fun at the pseudoempiricist: “A fantasy substance in the brain radically unavailable to sense helps David Hartley mediate between what feels and what is felt, spirit and matter, the ultimate divide. . . . For Hartley, nothing but the mysterious, ghostly nature of the infinitely small—as opposed to the merely very small—can provide the subtle, double-sided adhesion of body to soul, soul to body, that his system requires” (6–7, 43). Noggle does not ask what force requires adhesion in Hartley’s system (e.g., his faith). The assumption appears to be that pressure on the system is exerted by the system as it negates itself in favor of a higher synthesis. The result is a stunning reversal: the Enlightenment turns out to be rooted in Romanticism. Writing of Montesquieu and Voltaire, but also of his own book, Noggle holds that “the idiom of the insensible quietly provides an occult ingredient that Enlightenment history requires to present itself as enlightened” (117).Tracing the history of insensibly, Noggle does not concern himself much with dictionaries. He does, however, avail himself of the powerful search engines of the digital humanities to produce a number of Ngram charts of word frequency. The introduction visualizes Unfelt’s argument by graphing an apparently rapid rise in usage of insensibly during the years we now think of as pre-Romantic. A follow-up chart pictures the rise of unconsciously at the start of the nineteenth century, apparently at insensibly’s expense. This use of big data obscures more than it reveals. Insensibly was in currency from the mid-sixteenth century forward and had meanings ranging from the funereal to the medical to the theological to the political to the erotic. John Donne (1633: 264) uses insensibly in a dozen works, his poems and sermons alive to the word’s multiple associations: “Think thee a Prince, who of themselves create / Wormes, which insensibly devour their State.” John Dryden uses insensible or insensibly in at least thirteen works between 1667 and 1700. Insensibly appears in poems, plays, criticism, and translations. Explaining in A Defence of the Epilogue, or An Essay on the Dramatique Poetry of the Last Age why the drama of his time is so much better than Shakespeare’s, Dryden (1672: 174) credits the restoration of his monarch, Charles II, and the Stuart court: “Insensibly, our way of living became more free: and the Fire of the English wit, which was before stifled under a constrain’d melancholy way of breeding, began first to display its force: by mixing the solidity of our Nation with the air and gayety of our neighbours.” How is this usage different from Edward Gibbon’s remark in The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire that “at the Empire’s height the Italians ‘insensibly coalesced into one great nation’” (quoted in Noggle, 115)? Acknowledgment of another seventeenth-century usage would have helped Noggle explain why his idiom turns up all over the place. In A Sermon Preached before the Queen at White-Hall, October 12, 1690, the bishop of St. Asaph, William Beveridge (1690: 34), recommended habits of piety not onely now and then, but through the whole course of our lives. . . . For it is by our continual exercise of these holy duties and the Grace of God accompanying them, that our Hearts are insensibly taken off from sin and the world, and raised up higher and higher toward God and Heaven, till at length our whole Souls being sanctified by a quick and lively Faith in Christ, we are made meet to be partakers of the inheritance of the Saints in light.The theological use of insensibility was too deeply ingrained to vanish without a trace, and among its traces is Noggle’s supplement—the demon of metaphor! Small wonder that the idiom migrates from genre to genre into critical theory itself: “The insensible has become a feature not only of our neglect of what is going on outside and inside of our minds but of our coming to the highest levels of consciousness” (54).The use of big data also suppresses evidence of resistance to the key term, especially among women. Noggle’s chapter on gender unconvincingly enlists Eliza Haywood as an early instance of his sentimentalist thesis, calling her a novelist who used insensibility “to characterize the subtle onset of desire in the tradition of romance and scandalous fiction” (59). Haywood does indeed use insensible and insensibly frequently (thirty times in The Female Spectator alone), but often as a trigger warning of impending rape. A typical example occurs in The British Recluse; or, The Secret History of Cleomira (Haywood 1722: 111–12), when the title character allows herself to be lured by one Courtal into the woods at dusk: “It was not till the want of Light depriv’d me of the Pleasure of gazing on him; that I consider’d how long I had been with him, and that we were wandred, insensibly, perhaps, to either of us, at least to me, I am sure it was so, a great Distance from the House.” Taking Cleomira’s insensibility for permission to proceed, Courtal attacks her. Where the female experiences insensibility as confusion, the male uses it to cover his designs. Either way, whenever the insensible arises in Haywood, not all parties are equally clueless. The philosopher Mary Astell had already diagnosed the use of insensibly to obfuscate and miseducate. Tracing the causes of obscurity in writing, Astell (1701: 177–78) observes, “Sometimes even an honest and good Writer who studies to avoid [obscurity] may insensibly fall into it, by reason that his Ideas being become familiar to himself by frequent Meditation, a long train of ’em are readily excited in his mind, by a word or two which he’s us’d to annex to them; but it is not so with his Readers who are perhaps strangers to his Meditations.” Astell uses Locke’s theory of associationism to expose insensibility, which good writers avoid and evasive writers embrace. Astell further genders insensibly when lamenting the miseducation of women: “’Tis become no easy matter to secure our Innocence in our necessary Civilities and daily Conversations. . . . Censoriousness being grown so modish, that we can scarce avoid being active or passive in it. . . . In consequence of all this, we are insensibly betrayed to a great loss of time” (71–72). Here is Noggle’s keyword, but Astell means it both empirically and sarcastically, empirically because it stands for a predictable process of habit formation spurred by social pressures that shape malleable human nature, and sarcastically because the same empirical process, if directed to better ends, would improve, not degrade, female character. No reader of Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792) can fail to note her repeated attacks on the entire discourse of sentimentalism, sensibility, refinement, taste, delicacy, and their affective cohort. Noggle admits that Austen uses insensibly rarely but attributes this to the fact that when “Austen’s career as a publishing novelist began in the second decade of the nineteenth century, the special additive sense of the insensible and similar terms had waned” (109). The “special additive sense” is the meaning Unfelt foregrounds throughout, cordoning off “privative” uses of the term, such as insensibly’s association with death, deceit, and stupidity. In all of Austen Noggle discovers only one agreeable use, the scene in Sense and Sensibility when Willoughby visits Elinor to seek forgiveness for his mistreatment of her sister Marianne: “I found myself, by insensible degrees, sincerely fond of her; and the happiest hours of my life were what I spent with her, when I felt my intentions were strictly honourable, and my feelings blameless” (quoted in Noggle, 110). Noggle comments that this “one additive instance, passing as it is, helps the novel partially redeem the language of sensibility. . . . His conversion to the world of deep feeling, which he at first only pretended with Marianne, means something. . . . The unfelt advent of a man’s true feelings accredits not only him but the judgment of the sentimental heroine” (109, 110–11). That hopeful verdict does not cover the way Austen uses the word in Northanger Abbey, repeating her sister authors’ suspicion. Trembling in her room at Northanger Abbey, Catherine Morland imagines what might have happened to General Tilney’s dead wife: “Down that staircase she had perhaps been conveyed in a state of well-prepared insensibility!” Once again, and as in the example from Sense and Sensibility, insensibility conjures deceitful men and the violence they perpetrate against women.Unfelt is a densely theorized book; given its ambition to remake cultural history through the history of a word, however, it shows no love for its great precursors. Alluding to Raymond Williams and William Empson, Noggle writes, “Philosophy, historiography, and political economy all make copious if discreet use of such terms [as insensibly], though in a way quite different from how some ‘keyword’ or ‘complex word’ would be deployed” (1–2). A footnote adds one sentence more on Empson, since The Structure of Complex Words (1951) begins with a chapter called “Feeling in Words” and has four other chapters whose titles repeat variations on Unfelt’s inverted keyword: “These chapters have influenced my treatment of insensibly, which includes, by negation, Empson’s target term.” That’s it for Empson, and for Williams, whose Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) does not appear in index or bibliography.