Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism

by Jonathan Flatley

The surprising claim of this book is that dwelling on loss is not necessarily depressing. Instead, Jonathan Flatley argues, embracing melancholy can be a road back to contact with others and can lead people to productively remap their relationship to the world around them. Flatley demonstrates that a seemingly disparate set of modernist writers and thinkers showed how aesthetic activity can give us the means to comprehend and change our relation to loss.

The texts at the center of Flatley’s analysis―Henry James’s Turn of the Screw , W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk , and Andrei Platonov’s Chevengur ―share with Freud an interest in understanding the depressing effects of difficult losses and with Walter Benjamin the hope that loss itself could become a means of connection and the basis for social transformation. For Du Bois, Platonov, and James, the focus on melancholy illuminates both the historical origins of subjective emotional life and a heretofore unarticulated community of melancholics. The affective maps they produce make possible the conversion of a depressive melancholia into a way to be interested in the world.

Genres: Philosophy, Literary Criticism, Theory, Politics, Psychology, Nonfiction

272 pages, Hardcover

First published November 1, 2008

Reviews

[Adhoc · Rating 3 out of 5]

Jonathan Flatley's interesting argument is that dwelling on loss and grief can reactivate interest in the world and a sense of political community with others. Drawing from Frederic Jameson's term "cognitive mapping," Flatley defines affective mapping as the way we sense our way through our environments through affective attachments, attunements, moods, and values. Our experiences with modernity have made our affective maps more difficult to apprehend and thus incite feelings of loss and confusion. However, by attuning ourselves to the undeniably historical nature of our affects, the world can make its way into aesthetic experience through our affects. Melancholia as affective map can thus reconnect us to the world in an activated and interested way, rather than draining us and making us lose interest.

Relying heavily on Freud and Walter Benjamin, Flatley brings together a psychoanalytical and historical-philosophical approach. However, I wished he could have mobilized Benjamin a little more in his close readings of individual works (by Henry James, W.E. Du Bois, and Andrei Platonov). He can landscape the characters' psychologies well, but he was not as adept at connecting their affective maps to historical contexts and political movements. His lack of a gender analysis stood out a bit starkly for me as well. I find his arguments less compelling when he shortchanges the very contextual maps that he claims can be delivered unto our lived experiences by our affects.

[gegenwind · Rating 5 out of 5]

one of the most interesting literary studies i've read so far, highly recommend. i enjoyed simultaneously reading hustvedt's essays on perception and embodiment. her insights in mind, this study is incredible for any kind of literary analysis, but especially postmodern narratives. it's a shame this seems to be out of print, this is the rare occasion where I feel a wee bit tempted to steal a library book, but I don't want to spoil anyone else's reading of this...

[aerialxav]

Glossary

[Every Hero · Rating 1 out of 5]

Man, you know an academic monograph is going to be really good when it starts with a glossary of terms. The glossary of terms lead is really an underutilized critical device. It suggests the subject at hand is important enough to be written about by Flatley and studied by the presumed reader (we shall presume Flatley has a reader), yet not so important that said reader would have any previous knowledge of said subject, or that if Flatley suspected some critical piece of knowledge were required for his already specialized audience to understand said subject that it could not be incorporated into the essays proper. It also seems to suggest a static, dare I say structural approach to language itself: that somehow the meaning of a term is what you say it is, not how you use it in context, which is to say that Flatley’s approach here assumes that the meaning of a term does not change with each utterance, with each new interaction with its environment, that in fact a key feature of language itself is that a word can be utilized in new, inventive ways by a given speaker as well as in ways that are narrow and/or flawed. In this particular instance, Flatley appears to be using the glossary of terms form to actually divest himself of the responsibility of deciding how he will use the terminology in question, which is strange considering the glossary automatically places increased emphasis on this terminology and the terms themselves do not seem at all pivotal in the three essays that are supposed to form the core of his book; Flatley appears here, in a gesture equally timid and bizarre, to be avoiding a basic requirement of the act of speech. So when Raymond Williams said “structure of feeling,” he probably meant something like “structures that mediate between the social and the personal that are more ephemeral and transitory than set ideologies or institutions” (25). When Jonathan Flatley glosses it as part of an eighty-page introduction to one-hundred pages of relatively conventional close readings, it means: I MOCK LANGUAGE.

Flatley’s lack of comprehension of basic aspects of language and writing does not end there. It is really the primary malfunction underlying this patchwork, Frankenstein-like attempt at critical theory. For example, Flatley’s entire use of Freud is problematic. Flatley introduces affect as a universal, then tells us it is specifically modern, then tells us that Freud will help us understand this affect, which is both a universal human condition and paradigmatically modernist, because Freud was a modernist, even though Freud’s theories were intended to describe human psychology generally. But if you bother to actually untangle this mess, the root of Flatley’s problem with Freud isn’t any of these things individually but a fundamental cognitive glitch that renders him unable to distinguish between literal and figurative expression.

Flatley’s use of Freud in this book putters around two concepts: loss and transference. For loss he relies on two metaphors in two different passages in Freud: “the shadow of the object fell upon the ego” and “the character of the ego is a precipitate of abandoned object cathexis.” Here is how Flatley reads these metaphors:

“By ‘shadow’ here he seems to mean the libidinal attachment, or more nearly its negative aspects: the complaints about the object have been redirected toward the ego. But the metaphor of the shadow substantially complicates the picture, for it implies not that the object has been identified with the ego but that it has gotten between the ego and the light. What Freud is here calling an ‘identification’ is a kind of shadow play in which a certain portion of the ego has been marked in the shape of the lost object as darker than the rest. If the shadow itself is the libido, then the libido, like a light, projects the form of the object onto the ego. This means that it is not really the object that is interiorized but the libido, which had been attached to it; it is the libido (or affect) that moves, that is transferred, not the object. Moreover, the ego does not so much become the object as it comes to look like it, at least in its basic outline.” (46)

“As we know, a precipitate is the result of a chemical process whereby the mixture of two solutions causes a new solid substance to be created, which appears to fall out of the solution. Typically, the precipitate is formed by some part of each of the solutions disattaching from their original compound and coming together to form a third compound. That is, a precipitate contains some part of each of the solutions that have been combined, but does not resemble either of them: indeed it is another kind of thing.” (50)

These interpretations fail even on the most basic level of logic and comprehension. Flatley turns the action of a single “shadow falling” into some sort of Bacchanalian “shadow play” that “marks” rather than passively falls while imprinting a “darker shape” where the emphasis is not on form or tonal value but on content. He reads the “shadow” as the libido, then tells us, in a physical interpretation of the metaphor, that this shadow libido is like a light. He strains to tell us that it is the libido that is transferred to the ego and not the object, when the entire point of Freud’s passage is to theorize how the object becomes internalized by the ego via the libidinal attachment. The libido cannot be “interiorized” because it was never external to the subject. It is the object that becomes internalized, so that the internal libido has somewhere to go.

Flatley’s explanation of “precipitate” in the second passage makes even less sense. First of all, neither the original German “niederschlag” nor the English translation “precipitate” necessarily convey the chemical process of precipitation. The terms linguistically predate the scientific explanation of chemical precipitation and in German “niederschlag” isn’t even the preferred term for such a reaction, it’s “ablagerung” or “ausfallung.” The terms mean “something that falls quickly,” as in rain or snow, and were adopted in the field of chemistry on a purely descriptive basis. Second, strictly speaking, chemical “precipitation” refers to the creation of a solid, not to the process of mixing two solutions. “Two solutions” are not always required to cause precipitation, nor are the solutions required to form a new “third compound,” as in the case of precipitation due to supersaturation.

It is important to stress here that everybody else, including Freud, is using language in a normal way. For Freud, “shadow” and “precipitate” were metaphors he believed were universal to his audience and easily understood, and would therefore help the reader understand some part of his theories, which were more complicated. For Flatley, the simple metaphor somehow becomes representative of the whole theory, which can then be spun into whatever one wishes as long as some association is present and Freud gets in there somewhere. It is indicative of the book as a whole that Flatley specifically chooses a metaphor in a work of non-fiction as the basis of his understanding of that work and, instead of understanding the metaphor in context, decides to distort it by interpreting it literally. He is reading literal writing figuratively and figurative writing literally. This is his primary innovation.

As bad as they are, however, these small stiff misreadings of metaphorical language are nothing compared to the larger analogy Flatley feels he is entitled to make based on them. Here, for example, is how Flatley attempts to apply Freudian theory to Du Bois after hauling out Du Bois’s anecdote about having his calling card rejected by a tall white female classmate when he was young:

“ As Du Bois tells it, the white eye of the rejecting other is internalized as a super-ego-like critical agent . . . Problems arise when, now introjected, the affects that were earlier directed at the lost object are directed at the I itself, by what Freud called a new “special agency,” created for the purpose of keeping this ambivalent emotional tie alive . . . The process tends toward depression because the negative affects—the shadow of the object—previously directed toward the object now fall back on one’s self.” (123)

The section begins with an outline of the comparison:

“ . . . both Du Bois and Freud were struggling to understand why some relations to loss were depressing while others were not, and how one might develop or find a practice for converting one relation to loss into another. Furthermore, they understand the general problem in strikingly similar terms. For Du Bois, as for Freud, a difficult, ambivalent loss (the rejection by a classmate) is preserved through a process of internalization, producing what Du Bois calls ‘double consciousness.’ This becomes depressing, in each of their accounts, when negative affects attached to this internalized object return to cast their shadow on the subject.

“Yet where Freud is trying to develop a general theory of melancholia and a general technique for treating it, Du Bois is concerned with a particular group of people at a definite historical moment. For Du Bois, ‘the shadow of a dark despair’ falls not on him alone but on everyone on his side of ‘the veil.’ Indeed, the falling of the shadow is itself the moment of racial subjectification.” (117-8)

Flatley has identified binaries in the writings of these two figures and assumes that means they are analogous, but in point of fact they do not match up. Freud never talks about melancholy being transformed into “non-depressing” (Flatley’s term) mourning. In Freud’s analysis, melancholy and mourning are both responses to loss that share similar features, including outward observable affect, and are both capable of resulting in a return to a “way to be interested in the world.” If you take the second point of Flatley’s binary in Du Bois and plot it in Freud, you end up with three points of comparison, not two, and that is only if you accept that individual psychological “loss” and collective political “loss” have anything in common in actual practice except that the latter employs the former figuratively and self-referentially for rhetorical purposes. Indeed, here it is impossible to say we are dealing with “loss” at all. If “institutional white supremacy” is the loss that black America suffers, Du Bois never suggests that this loss can be experienced in a non-depressing way. The Souls of Black Folk is not about bringing to consciousness the conditions of white supremacy so that it can be mourned properly and ultimately ACCEPTED to relieve black America of its depression. Freud on the other hand was interested in the way that the same underlying mechanisms were involved in both “non-depressing” mourning and “depressing” melancholy, but nowhere treats the “exciting cause” in either case as subject to political transformation.

But if you put aside the question of the usefulness of an anecdote about personal rejection from fifth grade in a serious political treatise (Du Bois’s or Flatley’s), or the apparently antiquated idea that political service requires subordinating personal disappointments to a larger cause, or the fact that the average black person for whom Flatley claims Du Bois speaks could not have even experienced this “depressing loss,” since they did not grow up in the liberal and integrated Massachusetts community Du Bois was privileged to have, and accept Flatley’s comparison that African-American subjectivity in Du Bois is like a melancholic state in Freud at face value, you end up in a somewhat awkward position. Here is the paragraph in “Mourning and Melancholy” that Flatley dances around throughout his tortured and rudderless deep thinking on Freud. It is literally the paragraph after the one he cites, and makes the observation that one of the “preconditions” for this melancholic state is the presence of and regression to an original, childish narcissism:

“One or two things may be directly inferred with regard to the preconditions and effects of a process such as this. On the one hand, a strong fixation to the loved object must have been present; on the other hand, in contradiction to this, the object-cathexis must have had little power of resistance . . . this contradiction seems to imply that the object-choice has been effected on a narcissistic basis, so that the object-cathexis, when obstacles come in its way, can regress to narcissism. The narcissistic identification with the object then becomes a substitute for the erotic cathexis, the result of which is that in spite of the conflict with the loved person the love-relation need not be given up. This substitution of identification for object-love is an important mechanism in the narcissistic affections . . . It represents, of course, a regression from one type of object-choice to original narcissism. We have elsewhere shown that identification is a preliminary stage of object-choice, that it is the first way—and one that is expressed in an ambivalent fashion—in which the ego picks out an object. The ego wants to incorporate this object into itself, and, in accordance with the oral or cannibalistic phase of libidinal development in which it is, it wants to do so by devouring it.”

Later Freud sums up this transparently clear distinction thus:

“Melancholia, therefore, borrows some of its features from mourning, and the others from the process of regression from narcissistic object-choice to narcissism.”

There is actually a reference to this aspect of Freud’s theory in the “precipitate” passage from Ego and Id that Flatley uses as well. The “introjection” is “a kind of regression to the mechanism of the oral phase,” and later the “process” is most common “especially in the early phases of development.” So if we are to complete Flatley’s analogy for him—one that is so vital to Flatley’s critical approach that it had to be rolled out in a separate introductory section— what he appears to be saying is that Du Bois, and by his own extension all of black America collectively, should GROW THE FUCK UP.

Flatley’s misuse of Freud here does not come unannounced. He lays the groundwork for this disaster in a fifty-six page theoretical exposition (not including the all-important glossary of terms) that is approximately half the length of the remainder of book. In what he probably considered a critical moment in this drifting pile of trash, Flatley attempts to establish a claim that Freud’s model of “melancholic loss” serves as the basis for all “emotional ties” in a turn so certain and unshakeable that it had to be formulated as a series of rhetorical questions:

Continued here:
https://affectivemapping.wordpress.com/

[Nic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I lost a little bit of steam with this one by the final chapter, I think largely because I just don’t know anything about and had never heard of Andrei Platonov prior to this book. I think the subtitle should have been renamed “Melancholia and the Politics of Modernity” rather than “…of Modernism,” because I think that’s what Flatley actually describes.

I found Flatley’s glossary very helpful in giving a crash course on some key terms as they’re understood in theories of affect that may have been unfamiliar to others when the book was published in 2008. I appreciate the clarity here and other scholars have used this work as a model in foregrounding and clarifying specialized terms in academic monographs. These terms feel more common now. He also does a great job discerning an implicit theory of affects in Freud even though scholarship has insisted that Freud really articulated none. The Du Bois chapter I think was my favorite and most useful in thinking about how aesthetic practices open up a space of affective dialogue between reader and author to share in imaginative, emotional, and political-historical projects. I would return to and reread parts of this work.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

The particular strengths of this book are its glossary of affective terms (affect vs emotion, structure of feeling, melancholia) and Flatley's intriguing if not entirely worked through concept of affective mapping. The stakes of his argument for modernism seem hazier, and indeed we don't get to the primary texts until about page 90 (unless we count Freud as primary). Still, an incredibly useful work for those (like me) who are still getting their feet wet with affect theory.

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

i've been waiting 10 years for this. it's great.