Rorotoko

In a nutshell

In Political Affect I address human nature as bio-cultural. Each one of us is a “body politic” that connects the social and the somatic. I avoid the extremes of social constructivism and genetic determinism by claiming we inherit a minimal human nature that gets fine-tuned by culture. In a formula, our human nature has evolved to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature.

I get to my notion of human nature as “body politic” by putting the “embodied mind” school of cognitive science together with the post-structuralist French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. What attracted me to the embodied mind school (e.g., Hubert Dreyfus, Evan Thompson, Alva Noë, and the late Francisco Varela) is the critique of the standard computer metaphor of cognition as information processing and its alternate vision of cognition as an organism directing itself in its environment. Such embodied cognition is inescapably affective; the old division of reason and emotion needs to be rethought as “affective cognition.”

What Deleuze brings to the table is a wide-ranging materialist ontology, so that we can use the same basic concepts of self-organizing systems in both natural and social registers. This enables me to couple the “politic” to the “body,” to connect the social and the somatic. Basically, Deleuze lets us go “above” and “below” the subject; “above” to politics, and “below” to biology. We live at the crossroads: singular subjects arise from a “crystallization” or “resolution” of a distributed network of natural processes and social practices.

Political Affect starts by laying out the theory of politically inflected affective cognition, bringing Deleuze together with dynamical systems theory (a.k.a. “complexity theory,” or the theory of self-organizing material systems), and a number of positions in the affective, cognitive, and biological sciences, including “developmental systems theory,” a biological perspective that emphasizes epigenetic (cellular, organic, and even extra-somatic) factors as well as genetic factors in inheritance and development.

I then compare Aristotle, Kant, and Deleuze on the interchange of theology, biology and politics that has always haunted the philosophical treatment of the organism. Finally, I provide three case studies where the social-somatic connection that constitutes human nature results in the bypassing or at least the attenuation of consciousness. That is, I investigate instances where biologically inherited basic emotions, which have received in cultural experience different triggers and thresholds, result in, if not outright “takeovers” of behavior, at least strong unconscious biases. The three case studies are the Terri Schiavo case (empathy), the Columbine High School massacre (rage), and Hurricane Katrina (fear).

The wide angle

What I wanted to do in Political Affect was write a book on advances in the sciences that would use a continental figure (Deleuze) as part of its theoretical basis, and yet still be readable by both analytic and continental philosophers. This was something of a challenge, because for much too long philosophers have tolerated a harmful division in our profession, the infamous divide between “continental” and “analytic” philosophers. It’s impossible to avoid clichés in discussing this divide, for it was instituted and lives on via the power of cliché, unexamined presupposition, mutual distrust, and ignorance. So, the cliché is that the continentals study and model their inquiries after art and literature, while the analytics study and model their inquiries after the sciences.

Of course there are exceptions—analytic aesthetics and continental philosophy of science are subdisciplines on either side—but there is a sad kernel of truth in the cliché. The problem for my project is that continental philosophy of science looks at scientific practice as its object of study; it doesn’t incorporate scientific findings in a continental investigation of philosophical problems—in my case, the concept of human nature.

The opening to this project—a continental philosophy not “of” science, but “with” science—was provided by the way in which the embodied-mind scholars use the classical phenomenologists—Husserl, Heidegger, and Merleau-Ponty—as their philosophical resources in their reading of the cognitive sciences. Insofar as these phenomenologists are an important part of the training of any continental philosopher, there was the chance here to get continental philosophers to read cognitive science by following the trail of the embodied-mind thinkers and their use of phenomenology.

On the other hand, I wanted to nudge the embodied-mind school along one more step in their reading of continental philosophy, from the phenomenologists to the post-structuralists—in this case, Deleuze. While the turn to an embodied subject by means of phenomenology is a great advance over the computer model, we need to pay attention to the feminist (Simone de Beauvoir) and anti-colonialist (Frantz Fanon) criticism that the embodied subject of the phenomenologists had abstracted from racialized and gendered subjectivity. But such abstraction only serves to hide an implicit masculine and empowered subject benefiting from its social position, as Iris Marion Young shows in her essay “Throwing Like a Girl.” So instead of “the” (abstract) embodied subject, I propose Deleuze’s emphasis on interwoven natural and social systems to think about how multiple subjectification practices produce a distribution of affective cognitive traits in a population of subjects.

Continental philosophy of science looks at scientific practice as its object of study; it doesn’t incorporate scientific findings in a continental investigation of philosophical problems.