Volume 44, Issue 1

We need experimental research in cognitive neuroscience to reconsider interpretive methods. Foucault and his followers objected to empirical research on humans. The present critique of Foucault's Saussure-based conception of language derives from language conceptions supported by the latest experimental explorations of speech and visual recognition by neuroscientists. This critique is compatible with the concept of the “loosely structured actor” of practice theory as developed by Bourdieu, Giddens, Ortner, Sewell, and others. Besides being loosely structured, actors are also sites of emotional responses, as suggested by recent research in affective neuroscience. Interpretive methods that look beyond language to a larger array of phenomena once thought to be elements of “experience,” find substantial support in recent neuroscience research.

Brain research tries to identify neuronal correlates of cognition, emotion and behaviour. Research on the neurobiological factors associated with impulsive and aggressive behaviour is just one example of the endeavour to match neurotransmitter systems and brain-activation patterns with complex behaviour patterns. However, models of so-called “antisocial” and aggressive behaviour are often based on historical, and even pre-scientific, assumptions about socially adequate behaviour and its individual, social and religious underpinnings. We have to assess the link between neurobiological research on impulsive aggression to metaphorical constructions of social evil.

Is there a correspondence between the ethical and the aesthetic value of a work of art? A negative kind of moderate moralism suggests that the ethical defects of an artwork can sometimes impair its aesthetic value. Ethical defects sometimes prevent the recipient from responding appropriately to the work. Developing an “imaginative resistance”, we may be reluctant to imagine worlds that are morally different from ours. In morally deviating worlds people do not just think differently about morality; different things are morally good. Several approaches to this problem are considered, and an emotion-based account is defended.

After having helped his friend Jim to run away from slavery, Mark Twain's character Huckleberry Finn decides to turn him in, but finds himself doing just the contrary. This example is used in the philosophical literature to illustrate the rationality of emotion: even though his sympathy for Jim causes Huck to act against his better judgement, he seems to be doing exactly the right thing. The question is what is meant by “rationality” here. Three different meanings of this notion are distinguished, in order to show that Huck's sympathy is rational in the cognitive or epistemic sense of being appropriate to some objective feature of his actual situation. It is argued that, to be capable of this kind of rationality, emotions must have an evaluative-representational content. Finally, it is shown that emotional representations are partly determined by society and culture, without this implying the arbitrariness of emotional evaluation. We may then understand Huck's sympathy as a new and better evaluative perception and as a pioneering step in a continuous socio-cultural process of refining and improving our value categories.

On the threshold of modernity, religion and feelings have entered into a close relationship in Protestantism. In Reden über die Religion (1799) Friedrich Schleiermacher defined religion as feelings, indicating an original form of experience. Religion is thereby an existential seizure by a supernatural revelation that is, nevertheless, individually determined. From a religious-psychological perspective, William James established in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) that a close connection exists between religion and feelings. These can be described as religious feelings or as religion, whereby symbols which are defined in religious terms can be used for interpreting feelings and the individual acquires a frame of reference for interpreting.

When interpreting medieval literature, literary historians often rely on the cultural-anthropological distinction between “guilt cultures” and/or “shame cultures”. Whilst this is a valuable tool to analyse ways of regulating social behaviour, it becomes problematic when dealing with emotions. Analyses of medieval German literature have misunderstood the term “shame” as the emotion of shame. Using modern psychological and evolutionary theories one can reformulate the model and explain thus much better changes in mentality and social behaviour mediated through literature. Hartmann von Aue's Arthurian romance Erec provides an example for this.

Gender and sexuality belong to social markers that are most heavily influenced and also enforced by the affect of shame and the interpellation of subjects as shameful. Quentin Crisp's The Naked Civil Servant (1968) shows that discussions of shame and gender/sexuality are incomplete if they do not take into account strategies of “disinterpellation” (Sedgwick), which seek to undo the mechanisms of shame and shaming through displays of shamelessness.

Modernisation theories consider allegiances based on personal loyalty between rulers and subjects as expressions of a more “traditional” understanding of state and society. Nevertheless, such notions have proved to be remarkably persistent in the modern political imagination. Constitutional states may now legitimate political rule, but “systems of loyalty” (Paolo Prodi) have continued to mobilise political and military allegiances well into the twentieth century. This is particularly true for the concept of “Treue”, which has played a key role in the construction of German national identity in modern times.

The rhetorical doctrine of affects has not only developed a catalogue of emotions but has also described strategies to produce emotions and it has organized them into different stylistic types. Emotional symptoms are linked to rhetorical rules, aiming at the representation and production of passions. Rhetorical and poetic treatises have preserved the memories of these emotional techniques, and every period in history has its own ideas about exhibiting or suppressing emotional outbursts, highlighting either the Aristotelian or the Stoic tradition. Dostoevsky's work combines a modernized version of the rhetoric of affects with a psychosomatic discourse on hysteria and epilepsy. Hysteria appears in his novels as a special form of representation rather than as a psychic illness. Hysteria redefined as a stylistic means, combines illness with rhetoric in such a way that both refer to each other.

Russian silent movie interconnects Modernism, melodrama and emotions. As a new medium, the cinema reflects the transformations that Modernism has effected in the emotional repertoire. In Russian silent movies feelings give room to other desires, be they sexual or economic. A consideration of Russian silent-movie melodramas in terms of the Western melodrama theories of Peter Brooks, Thomas Elsaesser, and Laura Mulvey reveals that the Russian model differs from the excessive and passionate melodrama these critics describe by being morally ambivalent or even indifferent. Emotional crises are not resolved in happy (Western) endings but culminate in catastrophes. Urban, provincial and family melodramas provide different role models for the “new woman” who marks the centre of these movies. In these Russian silent movies, modernist discourse is closely linked to gender discourse.

Historically, indifference and disinterest belong to a variable semantic field of anti-feeling. This anti-feeling is predominantly gendered as male, and linked to a “self-fashioning of coolness”. Philosophical traditions of indifference go back to Hellenistic sources and range from Nietzsche's cynicism, over Plessner's cool persona, to Sloterdijk's “Kynismus”. They concern themselves with technologies of the self and stress disinterest as a strategy of survival. In the 1920s in Germany, Helmuth Plessner, Georg Simmel and Ernst Jünger argued that modern life in urban and capitalist environments generate emotional coolness; they foreground things and surfaces, yielding a poetics of “Sachlichkeit”. According to Jünger, war and the military form an attractive background for the concept of indifference. Joseph Roth and Erich Kästner play in their novels with the aesthetic possibilities of nearness and distance. Unable to live truly, their protagonists are forced to observe life from a distance. Albert Camus and Michel Houellebecq adopt this tradition of indifference, linking their disinterested heroes with moral monstrosities and perversions.

A campaign of “sentimental education”, i. e. an education for “real love”, took place in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. Soviet authorities, writers, filmmakers, as well as common people, started to differentiate between the language of love and the language of power. An autonomous site of intimacy was created at which many interests intersected. The authorities tried to control amorous speech and feeling, in order to turn them into something that had to be learned. Readers and viewers now had to face a completely new task, since, paradoxically, they were asked to act as autonomous subjects while subjected to manipulation by the Soviet pedagogy. The Soviet media indoctrinated the readers and viewers to imitate; they also supported critical interpretation and a reflective observation of the self and others.