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Part I
FEELINGS, IDENTIFICATION AND THE PROBLEMATICS OF CINEMA
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INTRODUCTION TO PART I
The emotional work of cinema: intersubjectivity, affective properties and emotional states
The cinema provokes us to see, to feel, to sense, and finally to think differently, and while this induces Deleuze to write his two volumes, those volumes in turn compel us to return to the cinema, to see its images in the light of our own captivity to the rituals of representation, the philosophical-narrative program we have been running.
(Greg Flaxman, Introduction to The Brain Is the Screen: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Cinema, 2000: 3)
As cinema makes manifest, we are moved when affects provide access to knowledge, when they reach into its very fabric, enacting a passage of unconscious experiences, a transfer of states of mind, feelings and moods. The moving image is thus not only a language of mental motion, but also a language for emotion â a moody, atmospheric way to fashion affects in transmittable fabrics.
(Giuliana Bruno, âPleats of Matter, Folds of the Soulâ, 2010: 227)
This section of Feeling Film looks at the role of feelings in the cinematic encounter and, more specifically, seeks to address feelings as a crucial part of how the viewer engages the cinematic experience both in the moment and over time. One way in which feelings may be described is in their status as affective properties or emotional states. For a cultural form such as cinema, which is so crucially tied-in with telling human stories and concerned with attempts at expressing human emotion, particularly in its popular forms, it seems vitally important to address the question of affect and emotion. Necessarily, recent film theory has sought to account for the affective and emotional properties of the cinematic encounter through various psychoanalytic and philosophical frameworks, and this current study discusses such work in some detail at various points. However, to begin, I would like to think through these topics in relation to formulations of affect in depth psychology, in addition to these other frameworks, in order to consider the role of warm, lived psychological reality as a foundational aspect of the cinematic encounter. In this sense, I am invoking warmth as a way of describing the embodied and inhabited world of psychology; an âinnerâ world that is both with and in the outer world. This is not to say that approaches in depth psychology cannot deal with cold realities and feelings: it is worth pointing out that I am not using the term âwarmâ to describe warm, fuzzy feelings and that sense of cathartic bliss sometimes popularly associated with warmth; I am really attempting to engage with the psychological realities of embodied spaces, and the imagined and fantasy spaces that are co-created with them. Depth psychology has a lot to offer film studies in this regard especially, perhaps, as affect as a concept, particularly in its embodied aspects, is a crucial question in clinical practice and much debate in the analytical tradition has been devoted to it. It is an approach to psychology, following the early pioneering work of Bleuler, Jung and others, that takes into account an understanding of the role of the unconscious. As Hockley puts it, the term âdepth psychologyâ is a suggestive one âin the way it hints that underneath the conscious part of the psyche there are unknown regions that have the capacity and power to influence the behaviour of the whole personâ (2013: in press). Some of these âregionsâ are highly personal in nature, others collective, and there is considerable overlap and reciprocation between the two at a deep, structural level. As we shall see, this inclusion of depth psychology is discussed in a critical form, in relation to philosophical debates on cinema and, in particular, phenomenological approaches to the moving image.
As Luke Hockley notes in his book Frames of Mind (2007), Jung formulated a typology for the psychological functions of personality fairly early on in his career. Although he was to move on to other concerns in his later period, Jung tended to return to these types throughout his work, and there are several instances within that corpus, as well as in that of his followers â the post-Jungians â where these functions retain a position of importance in identifying and working with normal pathologies of human thought and behaviour. These functions signify a psychology of the elements of personality that reach far beyond thought and behaviour, however, and here, following both Jung (1964, 1998) and Hockley, I outline this typology in order to give the reader a sense of where it might lie in relation to contemporary thinking on affect and the cinematic encounter.
For Jung, there are four psychological functions. Sensation tells us that something is; thinking tells us about the thing; intuition tells us about its potential (becoming, where it might lead); and feeling is an operation of evaluation about the thing (reflection, how we feel about it). The reader may note here that these types align fairly closely with the concerns of Greg Flaxman's statement on cinema in the above epigraph. Although Flaxman is pointing to a rather different philosophical tradition â that of Deleuze â nonetheless, most of the elements are present in his address. His statement that â[t]he cinema provokes us to see, to feel, to sense, and finally to think differentlyâ already mentions three of Jung's terms, whereas the last part of the statement, in a âreturn to cinemaâ, evokes, in my mind at least, the idea of intuition; a compulsion to return and to see (with fresh eyes, so to speak) the potentialities of cinema and, in turn, ourselves. Although radically differing in many ways, the Deleuzian cinema project and Jung's depth psychology tradition share some common ground, and I would like the introduction to the first part of this book to address this commonality.
The importance of affect for contemporary cinema theory
It seems to me that what these two areas of thought have in common is their concern with the importance of affect. Indeed, as Christopher Hauke points out, â[i]t is impossible to imagine the beginnings of psychoanalysis without the concept of affectâ (2000: 227). One may equally argue that it is impossible to regard Deleuze's cinema project without the same concept. Indeed, the latter half of his Cinema 1 book (2004) is devoted to his thinking on affectivity, affect as an entity and the âaffection-imageâ. Problems begin to arise when we start to dig into what, exactly, Jung and others working with depth psychology mean by the term âaffectâ. In particular, because the terms âemotionâ and âaffectâ are synonymous and often used interchangeably in Jungian and post-Jungian thought, it is difficult to pinpoint their meanings exactly. Compounded with this, is the often-held view in depth psychology approaches that both emotion and affect â either, if they mean the same thing â are kinds of feelings in the typology of psychological functions, but that they differ from feelings in the ways that we encounter and experience them.
Hockley (2007: 39) states that the blending of the terms âemotionâ and âaffectâ in Jungian thought, in their differentiation from âfeelingâ as an evaluative response, is useful for redressing an imbalance in traditions of film theory â in particular, the screen theory of the 1970s, with its primacy of the ocularâspecular and its emphasis on the ideological production of cine-subjectivity â which seemed to place little importance on emotion other than, perhaps, as a cathartic form of distraction. I would agree that in identifying feeling as an evaluative response, different to emotion and affect, Jungian thought refits film criticism with the tools for according feeling the same importance in the critical process as thinking and analysing â often accorded rational (and therefore sometimes deemed more valuable) status as critical faculties. However, the frequency with which âemotionâ and âaffectâ are homogenised in Jungian and post-Jungian theory is often confusing.
For example, the entry on âaffectâ from Samuels, Shorter and Plaut's Critical Dictionary of Jungian Analysis describes it as: â[s]ynonymous with emotion; feeling of sufficient intensity to cause nervous agitation or other obvious psychomotor disturbances. One has command over feeling, whereas affect intrudes against one's will and can only be repressed with difficulty [âŚ]â (1986: 11). The reader should note that, even in the encyclopaedic entry here, not only are the terms âemotionâ and âaffectâ stated as being synonymous, but, in further describing what they are, a switch is made without notice, giving the impression that the two phenomena are indeed one and the same. Even more confusingly, they are described as âfeeling of sufficient intensityâ in one phrase and different to feeling in the next. I disagree with this interchangeability on a number of philosophical and phenomenological points which I elaborate below. Indeed, we see disagreement within psychology theory: even in Jung's own early writings, there seem to be grounds for inferring that depth psychology does not always use the terms synonymously. He wrote that:
Affectivity, comprising all affects and quasi affective processes, is an inclusive concept which covers all non-intellectual psychic processes such as volition, feeling, suggestibility, attention etc. It is a psychic factor that exerts as much influence on the psyche as on the body.
(Jung, cited in Hockley 2007: 41)
As Hockley notes, Jung is here defining affectivity as encompassing emotion (as well as feeling), but he seems to be indicating that affect is different in that it is somehow embodied differently to emotion. In order that the confusion of terms does not detract from the usefulness of the post-Jungian conception of emotion and affect, we need to unpack what emotions and affects are, the qualities common to both, their relation to the notion of feeling as a reflective and evaluative experience, and the ways in which these terms describe quite different phenomenological inhabitations in their relationship with each other. Here I brief y outline some key interventions from Jungian and post-Jungian thought, noting the preponderance for interchanging emotion and affect, and offer the reader some thoughts on reinterpreting the dynamic of feeling in this theoretical tradition, in light of contemporary phenomenology and film-philosophy.
To start with, Jung notes in âApproaching the Unconsciousâ (1964: 49) that the common usage of the term âfeelingâ can denote sentiments (as in feeling anxious, troubled or elated), or a definition of an opinion (Jung's own example from official communications here: âThe President feelsâŚâ), or even an expression of intuition (for example, Han Solo's frequent use of the phrase âIâve a bad feeling about thisâ in the Star Wars film franchise). To summarise, Jung generally uses the term âfeelingâ in contrast to the term âthinkingâ, as a way of describing a judgement of value, although he also notes the common ground between thinking and feeling as ordering functions â âmaking senseâ of the world and evaluating its meaning. Indeed, John Izod has written on Jung's definition of feeling, remarking that feeling is âa process that imparts a definite value to a given content in the mind: one likes or dislikes it. It is a subjective process which, in expressing a sort of valuation, functions as a form of judgementâ (2006: 3â4). As such, feeling should be taken as equivalent to the thinking process in terms of its importance in ordinary cognitive operations. This is no less important for considering the kinds of feelings that are produced and co-created through the cinematic encounter.
This definition is very different to Jung's definition of âaffectsâ which, if the term has a common usage, would tend to describe how one feels in a bodily sense (butterflies in the stomach, intrusive feelings beyond one's immediate control, feelings of which we are not quite fully aware), as well as intuitively (again, Han Solo, feelings as they are becoming), which would suggest similarities with feelings in the Jungian typology. In depth psychology, however, the term âaffectâ takes on a rather different resonance, and Jung gave many different formulations of affect in his long career. Essentially, however, these definitions may be summarised by noting one or two here, along with their implications. For example, he wrote in 1964 that âI regard affect on the one hand as a psychic feeling-state and on the other as a physiological innervations-state, each of which has a cumulative, reciprocal effect on the otherâ (cited in Hockley 2007: 41).
Confusingly, this version of affect seems to have as much in common with Jung's concept of sensation with its links to perception in the manner of physical sense-perception (or what C. T. Stewart (2008) has termed a reciprocity to âlife stimulusâ) as it does with feeling in Jung's evaluative sense of the term. It ought to be pointed out that there do exist significant distinctions between what the two terms signify. Sensation is perhaps more typically identifiable in terms of engaging environmental detail, structuring our responses to experience of the world and helping us to order it. Affect tends to signify a more unconscious feeling-function in that it has the capacity to let content erupt into the conscious (a process known in psychotherapy as âinvasionâ) but also serves the purpose of managing the permeability between conscious and unconscious material.1 In my view, however, there are several ways in which the Jungian notions of sensation and affect are brought together in terms of physical feeling, and, as such, the Jungian take on affect (in its classical configuration, at least) enables us to think of it as going some way outside of the realms of emotion, even as it allows for a dynamic relationship between the two phenomena. Indeed, C. T. Stewart â a veteran of some decades in the field of clinical depth psychology â wrote a book-length study devoted to the role of affectivity in pathological conditions, and the dynamics of affect and feeling. Stewart writes that:
Jung understood that âthe essential basis of our personality is affectivityâ [âŚ] which I take to mean that the primary motivational system in humans, the energy behind all agency, is to be found in the innate affects. But these archetypal mechanisms need a human container in which to unfold, and a human other through which they can be mirrored and responded to.
(2008: 5)2
This approach to intersubjective relations finds some common ground with the post-Deleuzian emphasis on the notion of the âfoldâ â for example, as stated in the above epigraph, Giuliana Bruno's notion of the moving image as an âatmospheric way to fashion affects in transmittable fabricsâ (2010: 227). That affect operates as âan extensive form of contact: a transmission that communicates in different spaces, and does so tangiblyâ (2010: 214 [emphasis in original]).3 Stewart's approach to affectivity is also similar in some ways to the Sartrean modelling of intersubjectivity as set out by film theorist Tarje Laine (2007), in that Stewart's model accommodates an intersubjective mutual recognition process. However, it should be noted here that Laine would probably argue that the âmirroredâ aspect of mutual recognition needs to occur in order that any kind of affectivity can unfold in the first place. Additionally, the human container mentioned by Stewart runs counter to the existential notion of the unutterably alone but in- and of-the-world subject in whose existence as a conscious body enables such unfolding through mutual recognition of an other. Laine writes that:
Emotional experience is [âŚ] not to be found in the external world or in the âessenceâ of the subject, but in the texture of the whole intersubjective operation. This means that self, emotion and meaning are always and already both external and internal phenomenon [sic.]: it is through emotion in and through which the subject and the social world intertwine.
(2007: 119)
In the final section of this Introduction to Part I, I return to the idea of the intersubjective encounter, in relation to the notion of the fold, as it is crucial to my position on affectivity and the operations of feeling. For now, I would like to note that I do not wish to dwell on the âarchetypalâ aspect of the post-Jungian formulation of affect and intersubjectivity, instead bearing in mind Stewart's take on the idea of affects as a fundamentally dialectical movement. He suggests a âhappy dialecticâ of self and world that enables us to move beyond and towards a more material, embodied and actualised model of intersubjective encounter, a transcendent movement that proves extremely productive in thinking about the relationship between viewer and viewed.
âHavingâ feelings, and being âhadâ by them
One way to elaborate upon this is in rethinking affectivity not merely as an operation that springs from within but as kinds of feelings that are mobilised through such âenergetic orienting and apprehensionâ responses to, within and for the worl...
