Love and the Art Object

Chapter 6 examines how lesbian modernists oppose ideas of artistic impersonality through imbricating intimate affects in the production of their art objects. Objects considered here include literary texts, paintings, houses and interiors. The chapter engages both Michael Hardt’s notion of “corporeal reason” and the object relations psychoanalysis of D.W. Winnicott and Marion Milner to argue that Virginia Woolf, Gluck, and Eileen Gray demonstrate an intense concern with the materiality of artistic production. This preoccupation with “stuff” conveys a visceral, affective appreciation of their art, which serves as a realm in which transgressive sexual desires and identities may be safely articulated. From Gray’s lacquered surfaces to Gluck’s plasticine frames, these modernist art objects are saturated with affect, serving as tangible, material expressions of bodily and emotional intimacy.

Mind, Body and Embarrassment in Henry James’s The Awkward Age

This chapter considers James’s The Awkward Age (1899) in the context of fin de siècle mental science and its preoccupation, most evident in theories of emotion, with the materiality of the mind. Contributing to recent accounts that challenge the commonplace equation between psychological depth and James’s transition to modernist novel, the chapter argues that The Awkward Age represents mental life – and in particular awkwardness – as public behavior rather than introspection, self-presence and interiority. In a similar fashion to late-Victorian mental scientists (including his brother, William), James was concerned with finding a vocabulary for representing mental life in physical terms, demonstrating the interrelation of mind and body. James’s use of a behavioural rather than expressive vocabulary for embarrassment determines the shape of the novel’s plot and forms part of its critique of a Victorian prudery that presupposes a mind-matter separation.

From Odysseus to Rotpeter: Adorno and Kafka, Mimicry and Happiness

Chapter 10 considers an Adornian form of happiness that might be found in the correspondence between the poles of instinct and culture, a happiness that is not a simple return to nature but an appreciation of pre-human animal pleasure that can only be realised from a retrospective lapsarian position of properly socialized reason. This advanced, if indolent happiness is a non-identitarian happiness in alterity that stands in sharp contrast with the forms of modern bourgeois satisfaction anachronistically typified for Adorno and Horkheimer in the figure of Odysseus, who has relinquished primal happiness. The chapter explores the affective intertwinement of nature and reason in Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917), which demonstrates the absence of an enlightened sociality that might enable the happiness immanent in nature to be redeemed.

Fear and Precarious Life after Political Representation in Baudelaire

Exploring the connections between public knowledge and public emotion, Chapter 8 considers the question of what counts as intelligible or “common” life in two lyrics from Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du mal (1868) – ‘Correspondance’ and its re-reading in ‘Obsession’ – and a series of related texts by Paul de Man, Edgar Allan Poe, and Walter Benjamin. Bringing these texts together to produce a genealogy of modern fear, the chapter considers how a Benjaminian “pure poetry” or arresting expressionlessness retrieves and reenacts the differences between representational copies of fear and sensory responses to fear, disclosing a defensive motion in modernity between ideology and affective life.

Animating Cane: Race, Affect, History and Jean Toomer

This chapter explores the Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer’s critical deployment of a racist stereotype that links African American subjectivity to extreme emotional expressiveness. In his 1923 experimental volume Cane, Toomer not only invites readers to question whether such affects “belong” to the subject, but employs these stereotypes to offer an embodied, affective history of American racism. Drawing on Sianne Ngai’s concept of racial “animatedness,” which captures the slippage from vitality and exuberance to a powerless, puppet-like state of innervated, non-intentional agitation, the chapter argues that Toomer uses affective stereotypes to diagnose the powerlessness of his subjects and to narrate a traumatic history in which persons are confused with things.

Logic of the Heart: Affective Ethical Valuing in T. E. Hulme and Max Scheler

Chapter 3 invites a reconsideration of T.E. Hulme’s apparent anti-emotionalism by emphasising the influence of Max Scheler’s phenomenology on Hulme’s war writing, highlighting the affective response to trench warfare evident in Hulme’s personal correspondence and in the poem, “Trenches: St. Eloi.” This poem, which captures the negative affects aroused by trench warfare, also suggests the necessity of fighting, and is read in the light of Hulme’s account of the revelation of objective ethical values through affective experience in his ‘War Notes’ and ‘A Notebook’. Hulme takes his term for this affective ethics – ‘logique du coeur’ – from Pascal, but his most significant debt is to Scheler, for whom ethical values are both revealed and hierarchised through acts of feeling, a phenomenology echoed in Hulme’s attack of pacifism.

Introduction: Modernism and Affect

This introductory chapter discusses the role of affect, emotion, and sentiment in modernism and modernist literary criticism. Challenging the assumption that modernism represents a flight from feeling, the chapter suggests that modernist affect should be recognised as various and complex. The introduction traces the origins and key insights of theory’s “affective turn” at the end of the twentieth century, discussing the relationships between affect theory and poststructuralism and the distinctions between “affect” and “emotion.” While emphasising the diversity of contemporary theories of affect, materiality, and embodiment, the introduction outlines the distinctions between the two most significant strands of affect theory – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s queer revival of Silvan S. Tomkins’s psychobiology and Brian Massumi’s Deleuzian reading of Spinoza and Bergson.

Making Happy, Happy-making: The Eameses and Communication by Design

The final chapter considers modernism at midcentury through the iconic designed objects, practice, and public image of Charles and Ray Eames. While the idea of happiness that circulates through such objects and images can be seen as a way of orienting consumers towards the postwar American “good life,” it is ultimately more instructive as a model of production, a form of happy-making indebted to the Bauhaus tradition and to modernist notions of the seriousness and difficultly of artistic pleasure. The chapter focuses on the Eameses’ short film A Communications Primer (1953) to consider their happy-making as a kind of making happy, where happiness is not connected to freedom or self-expression but rather requires calculation. The Eameses find in postwar materials and technologies a therapeutic, compensatory or biomorphic happiness produced in the shadow of the bomb, demonstrating a hope to manage contingency through scientific accuracy and technique.

Bloom-Space of Theory: The Pleasure and the Bliss of Gerty MacDowell

This chapter presents a critique of affect theorists’ attempts to situate the novelty of their discourse in its separation from poststructuralist linguistic philosophies, a separation that takes the character of a disavowal rather than an observation. The chapter interrogates the construction of affect as a form of extra-linguistic excess, arguing that the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses allows for a reconsideration of affect as a non-pure or non-originary state in its relation to modernity. Exploring the continuities between Roland Barthes’s elaboration of jouissance and contemporary descriptions of affect, the chapter considers Joyce’s novel as both a text of jouissance (understood by Barthes not as non-linguistic excess but rather as excess borne out of the signifying plurality of the text) and as a less radical text of plaisir, mimetic of affect. Ultimately, Ulysses refuses to separate literal and textual jouissance and posits the processual, unfixed, and material nature of language itself, thus challenging theories in which affect is formulated in opposition to (fixed) semiosis.

The Amplification of Affect: Tension, Intensity and Form in Modern Dance

In Chapter 5 affect is considered as corporeal tension and intensity in two modernist works by the Ballets Russes, Léonide Massine’s Parade (1917) and Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’après-midi d’un faune (1912). Following Massumi’s theory of affect as an autonomous intensity and Susan Langer’s similarly transcorporeal notion of a “continuum of feeling,” the chapter explores forms of dance in which affect is grounded in the material gestures of the body and located in the tensions required to create these abstract forms. Feeling was not suppressed in avant-garde dance but rather depersonalised and de-psychologised, following a different logic from the model of emotion as self-expression that dominated classical ballet in the nineteenth century.