Representing Emotions
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Representing Emotions

New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine

Helen Hills, Penelope Gouk, Penelope Gouk

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eBook - ePub

Representing Emotions

New Connections in the Histories of Art, Music and Medicine

Helen Hills, Penelope Gouk, Penelope Gouk

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About This Book

Juxtaposing artistic and musical representations of the emotions with medical, philosophical and scientific texts in Western culture between the Renaissance and the twentieth century, the essays collected in this volume explore the ways in which emotions have been variously conceived, configured, represented and harnessed in relation to broader discourses of control, excess and refinement. Since the essays explore the interstices between disciplines (e.g. music and medicine, history of art and philosophy) and thereby disrupt established frameworks within the histories of art, music and medicine, traditional narrative accounts are challenged. Here larger historical forces come into perspective, as these papers suggest how both artistic and scientific representations of the emotions have been put to use in political, social and religious struggles, at a variety of different levels.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351904155
Edition
1

PART 1
INTRODUCTION

CHAPTER 1

Towards Histories of Emotions
Penelope Gouk and Helen Hills
But was it Ulysses? Or was it only the warmth of the sun On her pillow? The thought kept beating in her like her heart. The two kept beating together. It was only day.
—Wallace Stevens, ‘The World as Meditation’
This collection of essays examines ways in which emotions have been conceived, articulated and treated in Western art, music, philosophy and medicine, their interrelationships and their bifurcations, in a series of case studies ranging between the fourteenth century and twentieth century and focused on western Europe and the USA. Its origins lie in the symposium, ‘Representing Emotions: Evidence, Arousal, Analysis’, held at the University of Manchester in May 2001, which drew on contributions from historians of art, music and science, and even included some memorable singing. Our starting-point is that ‘the emotions’, unchanging within human nature, transcending historical conditions, do not exist. Rather, ‘emotions’ are brought into being socially and historically, and recognized, encouraged, controlled, particularly in relation to race and colour, social class and gender. The ways in which emotions are articulated and represented are crucial in these processes.
The essays collected here do not, and of course could not, constitute a chronological or geographical survey of the representation of emotions in Western Europe since the Greeks. More significantly, we have not privileged those historical conjunctions conventionally identified as crucial for changing patterns in emotional articulation (for instance, the Ancient World, the medieval era and the eighteenth century), nor singled out those thinkers most usually credited with formulating new approaches (for example, Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Descartes, Le Brun, Spinoza, Rousseau, Voltaire).1 Instead, our principal aim has been to focus the investigative spotlight on specific moments when one formulation of emotions conflicts or converges with another, or when gaps or ellipses in one discourse on emotion are illuminated by another. In adopting this dual approach, we draw attention both to the necessarily non-disciplinary ways in which emotions have been conceived and to the complex processes by which some ideas eventually achieve authoritative status while others wither, neglected.
These studies, therefore, investigate particularly fruitful engagements in and interstices between theories of emotions, most specifically discourses about emotions articulated by a range of historical scholars, artists, scientists and music theorists, and discourses within present-day academic disciplines. We have sought to achieve a balance between breadth and focus in relation to the period under discussion, with most of the chapters ordered chronologically, in the belief that the profile of changes and continuities in emotional representation becomes sharper when seen over an extended period. But we have highlighted four dominant themes, which cut across the time-span represented here: emotions and religious belief, emotions and the body, emotions and discipline, and our overarching theme, emotions and representation. We discuss each of these below.
Scholarly interest in emotions has intensified over the last two decades, and continues to increase, with several recent interdisciplinary conferences on the subject.2 Within this abundance, the scarcity of historically-contextualized studies is striking. The literature is overwhelmingly dominated by medical, ethical and philosophical publications in which emotions are often assumed to be natural entities amenable to scientific analysis. By comparison, history is practically invisible. Of course, as Peter Burke reminds us in Chapter 2, individual historians have been writing about emotions since the nineteenth century, when the idea that emotions may have a history was first articulated. Anthropologists have also played a key role in situating emotions contextually and in paying careful attention to their social contexts. Nevertheless, professional historians have only turned towards the subject comparatively recently.3
This volume attempts to further collective historical understanding of emotions by focusing on their representations, by bringing together recent insights from within art history and history of medicine with those of historians concerned with changing musical practices and the ‘expression of the passions’. The histories of art, music and medicine have all separately grappled with issues of emotional representation and expression but have not interrogated them systematically in relation to each other. Our book steps towards exploring social and historical connections and disjunctions between all three fields, without assuming that an historical homogeneity can be obtained between them.
At every level, the representation of emotions is complex. Even the terminology of emotions is fraught with pitfalls. As Burke emphasizes, there is much historical groundwork to be done on the term ‘emotion’ itself and on all the problems of translation that are entailed in the process. Terminology, betraying ways in which emotions are conceived, is key to their shaping, as Graham Richards and Michael Heyd argue (Chapters 3 and 7). All the essays here fully acknowledge how far emotions are the product of a continuous process of verbal and non-verbal fashioning and interpretation.
The term ‘emotion’ early referred not to feelings but to physical movement or migration (it originally came from the Latin emoveo, to move out or move away). Thus Knolles’s History of the Turks (1621) refers to ‘The divers emotions of that people’.4 It continued to be used to mean a moving, stirring agitation in a physical sense until the early nineteenth century. Likewise in Old High German the verb ‘leiden’ signified movement in the sense of walking or travelling.5 In Chapter 3 Richards shows how the word ‘emotion’ was used figuratively to refer to an agitation or disturbance of the mind, that is passion, from the late sixteenth century, but was not in common use in this sense until the nineteenth century. There is, therefore, no overarching definition of ‘emotions’ that applies to all periods and all places; nor would a list enumerating specific emotions (fear, anger, and so on) serve to explain how such terms were conceived, and how these constructs were employed. Nevertheless, precisely because emotions are culturally mediated and, therefore, culturally variable, an analysis of the ways in which they were defined, by whom, and for what purposes is an important undertaking. The essays gathered here seek to illuminate what was at stake, to whom, and why, when specific attempts were made to redefine emotions, or to redescribe their relationships to God, to humankind or to social progress and specific social groups.
The relationships between feelings and the soul and between the body and soul were central to discourses on emotions from the Greeks to the twentieth century (when, broadly speaking, the notion of the self replaced that of the soul). In Renaissance Italy, the term affetto referred to movements of the mind or soul (Dante, Purgatorio XXV.107–8: ‘Secondo che ci affigono i disiri / e li altri affetti, l’ombra si figura’; Maestro Alberto 37: ‘Gran tumulto d’affetti t’ha posseduto’), as well as to mean love, affection, desire or aspiration.6 In English ‘affect’ early referred to the way in which one is affected or disposed, a mental state (thus Chaucer (c. 1374): Troylus III.1342–3: ‘And therto dronken had as hotte and stronge / As Cresus did, for his affectes wrong’); and in Renaissance English ‘affect’ came increasingly to be distinguished from ‘effect’, the first referring to inward disposition, as contrasted with external manifestation or action, with ‘effect’ or result.7
As Dalia Judovitz explains in Chapter 6, whereas the modern sense of ‘passions’ refers to psychological, affective states that imply the expression of sentiment or emotion as forms of subjective agency, these secular notions of sentience or sensibility fail to convey the religious significance of passion that was dominant until the late seventeenth century. In fact the word ‘passion’ derives from the Latin passio, which means to suffer or endure, to sustain action from without—an internal state that remains imperceptible unless there is a movement or a disturbance outwards (in other words, there is emotion) that reveals this inner suffering. From early on this condition became especially associated with the Passion of Christ, but the primacy of the Christological meaning of passion was gradually drained from the word from the late seventeenth century. In secular terms in English, ‘passion’ was used to mean the fact or condition of being acted upon or affected by external force from Chaucer’s time (c. 1374). As Thomas Wright explained in his Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), these mental states are called passions ‘because when these affections are stirring in our minds, they alter the humours in our bodies, causing some passion or alteration in them’. According to Judovitz, it was in late-seventeenth-century France that ‘passion’ first came to be defined in physics as a natural body relative to and opposed to an action, or one that suffers the intervention of an agent. This redefinition of passion in terms of physical action and rational agency announced the declining primacy of passion’s spiritual and sacred referents. In this way, ‘passion’ came to mean any kind of feeling, particularly a vehement, or overpowering emotion.8 In Middle High German the borrowed Latin word Passion referred to the history of Christ’s suffering. This extended from theology to the arts (Christ’s Passion was set to music well into the eighteenth century). But, as in French, from the seventeenth century the term lost its resolutely Christological meanings and came to refer to strong inclination and emotions.9
Although we do not believe that emotions are best analysed in terms of an historical account that seeks to trace their development chronologically, with its attendant risks of an imposed teleology, nevertheless it is clear that a conceptual chasm exists between the passions understood by Michael Schwartz’s fourteenth-century painters and their patrons (Chapter 4) and those investigated by Otniel Dror’s twentieth-century experimental scientists (Chapter 13). Schwartz’s actors experience passion as loss of self in the presence of God, while Dror’s experimenters try to manipulate specific emotions to master themselves and others. We suggest that the differences of understanding between the protagonists of these two chapters, which represent the temporal limits of this book, are the result of profound shifts in ideas about what constitutes the self, subjectivity and moral management. However, we have avoided presenting the essays here in terms of periodization, emphasizing instead themes that sometimes span considerable geographical and chronological distances.
We have resisted periodization as the dominant mode of presentation because it has several drawbacks. First, such an approach risks producing a teleological account, in which ideas about emotions that are not pursued by later thinkers appear as cul-de-sacs, irrelevant to those historical processes that have produced present-day configurations. We want to avoid presenting the contingency of history as either inevitable or evolutionary. Second, given that in any one period multiple (and contradictory) histories of emotions could be told, we see no reason why periodization should have dominance over any other presentation of the material. Periodization risks effacing the diverse, often contradictory approaches to emotions held at any one time, which varied by region or language in relation to social class, gender, race and so forth. (As we see in Chapter 6, for example, at the very time when Descartes was developing his ideas on self-mastery through reason, the French painter Georges de la Tour (1593–1652) reaffirmed an alternative notion of self in which spirital passion was the goal.) Third, having deliberately eschewed the ‘great thinkers’ approach to emotions, which is itself often framed chronologically, we did not want to implicitly affirm this method by adopting periodization in its place. A multi-authored, relatively short book like this is far better suited to examine specific problems at specific junctures.
The collection shows that debates about passions are driven by fundamental concerns about the precise nature of the relationship between the individual and society; the relationship between ‘nature’ and ‘society’, and the moral values seen to inhere in each; assumptions about children’s development; notions of the soul and its relation to the body; and ideas about the body and its relationship to the feeling subject—with concomitant assumptions about gender, age, race, ethnicity and social class. Thus in any discussion of emotions much is at stake. While a discussion of any one of these issues may seem to lie far removed from the other poles, in fact, as these essays expose, other issues are always implicated. In sum, emotions lie at the heart of fiercely-fought controversies over human nature, social governance, morality and identity, which not only divide disciplines but also divide proponents within disciplines from each other. The princi...

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