Uncomfortable Situations: Emotion between Science and the Humanities

by Daniel M. Gross

Overview

What is a hostile environment? How exactly can feelings be mixed? What on earth might it mean when someone writes that he was “happily situated” as a slave? The answers, of course, depend upon whom you ask.

Science and the humanities typically offer two different paradigms for thinking about emotion—the first rooted in brain and biology, the second in a social world. With rhetoric as a field guide, Uncomfortable Situations establishes common ground between these two paradigms, focusing on a theory of situated emotion. Daniel M. Gross anchors the argument in Charles Darwin, whose work on emotion has been misunderstood across the disciplines as it has been shoehorned into the perceived science-humanities divide. Then Gross turns to sentimental literature as the single best domain for studying emotional situations. There’s lost composure (Sterne), bearing up (Equiano), environmental hostility (Radcliffe), and feeling mixed (Austen). Rounding out the book, an epilogue written with ecological neuroscientist Stephanie Preston provides a different kind of cross-disciplinary collaboration. Uncomfortable Situations is a conciliatory work across science and the humanities—a groundbreaking model for future studies.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226485171
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	08/28/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Daniel M. Gross is professor of English and director of composition at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of The Secret History of Emotion: From Aristotle’s Rhetoric to Modern Brain Science.

Read an Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

Defending the Humanities with Charles Darwin's The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

When Charles Darwin first published The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872) his purpose was to show continuity in emotional expression across species and thereby strengthen his theory of evolution. Surrounding the book's illustrations, therefore, one finds descriptions of animal emotion designed to elicit our recognition as members of a universal audience. In this case (Fig. 1.1) our charm instantiates Darwin's argument for emotional continuity across species at the same time that we as members of an historical audience may miss the sly provocation of contemporaries with which the passage concludes.

The lips of young orangs and chimpanzees are protruded, sometimes to a wonderful degree, under various circumstances. They act thus, not only when slightly angered, sulky, or disappointed, but when alarmed at anything — in one instance, at the sight of a turtle — and likewise when pleased. ... The accompanying drawing represents a chimpanzee made sulky by an orange having been offered him, and then taken away. A similar protrusion or pouting of the lips, though to a much slighter degree, may be seen in sulky children.

This passage, like many others in the Expression (as Darwin called it) is both rhetorical and inseparable from its science that we sometimes imagine transcending the material that binds it to accidents of medium, occasion, and person. In this chapter, I recall how Darwin's Expression foregrounds the inherent rhetoricity of emotion, thereby outstripping Paul Ekman's science of emotion that claims to follow in its wake, and which has recently infiltrated the humanities like a Trojan horse settling in a new critical subfield of Cognitive Approaches to Literature (CAL). Instead I will argue Darwin's rhetoric of emotion is remarkably skeptical and humanistic, which does not diminish its scientific piquancy, but rather aligns it with our "situated" theories in the science of cognition recently mobilized, among other places, by the philosopher of biology Alva Noë in Out of Our Heads: Why You Are Not Your Brain, and Other Lessons from the Biology of Consciousness.

Though initially a bestseller, the Expression lapsed into relative obscurity during the next century as Darwin's evolutionary theory established itself primarily on other terms, including, most importantly, the fossil record, homologies across related life-forms, geographic distribution of related species, and artificial selection like dog breeding. Meanwhile, the ambiguities of studying emotion rendered it a difficult and even suspect science for the next century, especially insofar as the mechanics of our emotional life lacked the reliable metric promised by a rational life that might be reconstructed in the spirit of logical positivism or tracked, for instance, through idealized behaviors such as rational choice in the marketplace. "It's raining" seemed the kind of thought that might reliably link the mind and the real world, but something like the experience of fear suffered from all sorts of semantic and practical ambiguities that made any experimental project difficult to realize, even after Darwin's evolutionary argument. More recently, however, the Expression has made a dramatic comeback as the study of emotion mushrooms across academic disciplines and in applied fields such as homeland security or in a popular arena such as the cop drama Lie to Me, which was built around expert analysis of emotional microexpressions à la Ekman. Now considered wrong about certain facts, such as the Lamarckian inheritance of acquired characteristics and the emotional primitivism of the insane, Darwin's Expression has recently reemerged as the foundational work in the science of emotion, both in terms of methodology and theory. In 1998, nearly a full century after the second edition, Ekman introduced and provided a running commentary on the third edition, underscoring how passages such as the following grounded the methodology for studying emotion still followed today across the social and natural sciences.

Dr. Duchenne galvanized, as we have already seen [Fig. 1.2, 1.4], certain muscles in the face of an old man, whose skin was little sensitive, and thus produced various expressions which were photographed on a large scale. It fortunately occurred to me to show several of the best plates [Fig. 1.3, bottom], without a word of explanation, to above twenty educated persons of various ages and both sexes, asking them, in each case, by what emotion or feeling the old man was supposed to be agitated; and I recorded their answers in the words which they used. Several of the expressions were instantly recognized by almost every one, though described in not exactly the same terms; and these may, I think, be relied on as truthful, and will hereafter be specified. (E, p. 21)

Then Ekman abruptly inserts the following comment in the 1998 edition: "Darwin describes here his use of a method to find out what information is conveyed by an expression: asking people to judge the emotion shown in a photograph without any information about the situation in which the expression occurred, and determining whether or not they agree. This has become the most commonly used method for studying facial expression, although Darwin is rarely cited as the first to use it." Indeed, Ekman himself has applied what he considers essentially the same methodology over the last thirty-five years as he developed his influential work on the basic pancultural emotions displayed in the image set (Fig. 1.5). Can you name them?

Relying on this image set and others like it, Ekman has produced a methodology for studying emotion scientifically, and from this work he has developed the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) used widely in cognitive science designed to locate emotional centers in the brain by correlating brain activity with exposure to carefully selected photographs. Of the cognitive scientists who rely upon FACS, Antonio Damasio is the most influential in the humanities, as we will see below.

In Nature, for example, Damasio describes an experiment where patients with a damaged amygdala judge faces on a trustworthiness and approachability scale. The faces had been previously selected by "normal individuals" who were asked: "How would you rate this face on the scale of one to five, relative to the trustworthiness and approachability that the owner of the face inspires? Or, in other words, how eager would you be to approach the person with this particular face if you needed help?" As it turns out, Damasio reports that amygdala-damaged patients judged as trustworthy and approachable faces "you or I" would consider suspicious and try to avoid. Then on the basis of this experiment, Damasio and his colleagues located the relevant emotion in the brain, while bracketing some pressing questions about what counts as a trustworthy and approachable face, to whom, under what circumstances, and why. Technical issues abound.

In a section of his book provocatively titled "The New Phrenology?," Noë outlines a debilitating set of problems faced by researchers who try to locate us in our brains, including most importantly the following: 1) the impossibility of eliminating feedback produced by the two-directionality of the brain-senses loop; 2) normalizing imperatives that produce results against a stock brain; and 3) the impossibility of eliciting direct information about consciousness or cognition through PET and fMRI technologies that have to correlate physical magnitudes to blood flow, blood flow to neural activity, and finally neural activity to mental activity like feeling suspicious (see Noë, 19–24; also my epilogue). Although a brain-scan image may contain important information about neural activity related to a cognitive process, cautions Noë, "we need to take care not to be misled by the visual, pictorial character of these images. Brain scans are not pictures of cognitive processes in the brain in action" (Noë, 24).

But for our purposes the shortcoming that matters most is methodological: emotions cannot be broken down into basic units — whether that means molecules, brain images, or facial expressions — without losing track of the phenomenon at hand. Psychologist Jerome Kagan emphasizes our category mistake when the amygdala is activated by exposure to a photograph of an angry face and the resulting image is called an emotion. The neuroscientist who insists that a particular brain state represents an emotion resembles the physicist who denies the reality of my pen because the mathematical interpretation of quantum mechanics rejects the existence of stable objects. Though it may be useful to look for the elementary foundations of both psychological and physical phenomena, Kagan concludes, complex phenomena possess distinct properties and therefore require "distinct metrics and principles" (What Is Emotion? 214). That Kagan's valedictorian address to his students and colleagues requires this reminder is not surprising. Surprising is that cautionary tales about parsimony in human affairs speak to a growing number of humanities scholars who overlook precisely the situational nuances that would seem most amenable to their indigenous methodologies, as we will see below.

So what does an evolutionary psychologist like Ekman mean by basic emotions? Ekman applies the word basic to emotions evolved for their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life tasks such as achievements, losses, frustrations, and so on. According to Ekman, each emotion "prompts us in a direction which, in the course of evolution, has done better than other solutions in recurring circumstances that are relevant to goals," and "innate factors play a role in accounting for the characteristics they share, not species-constant or species-variable learning." Thus his commentary on Darwin's Expression winds down with the following strong program: "Although the specific event varies — the type of food, the general theme — ingesting something repulsive as a cause for disgust, or ingesting something attractive as a cause of enjoyment — is universal. I think this is a good model for all the emotions." However, this is also where Ekman and his legions leave Darwin behind, with a sleight of hand that obfuscates the subtlety of Darwin's work at the same time that it nudges to the periphery of serious science the emotions that escape this expressivist model of evolutionary biophysiology. In fact, as we will see below, Ekman doesn't consider anything beyond the basic emotions to be emotions at all.

Among other things, this impoverished Darwinian model suggests we investigate how a novel might serve as an emotionally competent object where certain formal features elicit from the reader a sympathetic or antipathetic response divorced from immediate action.

An early example of such criticism would be June Howard's American Literary History article "What is Sentimentality?," which mobilizes Ekman and Damasio in an effort to undermine debates about whether sentimentality is a good or bad thing. More important than this evaluation, argues Howard, is a transdisciplinary investigation of sentimentality that would better explain how reading sentimental fiction is a bodily act where the text that produces "pulse beats and sobs ... radically contracts the distance between narrated events and the moment of their reading, as the feelings in the story are made tangibly present in the flesh of the reader." Likewise in Shakespeare's Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory, Mary Thomas Crane draws from Ekman and Damasio to argue for a reading of literature that grounds the mind — including conscious and unconscious mental experiences of perception, thought, and language — in the brain and other bodily systems. In Jane F. Thrailkill's Affecting Fictions: Mind, Body, and Emotion in American Literary Realism, Ekman and Damasio are mobilized throughout, particularly where the novel is described as an aesthetic technology of the human organism. "In the relatively recent field known as Cognitive Approaches to Literary Studies," summarizes Suzanne Keen in her study of empathy and the novel, the work of Ekman, Damasio, and Joseph LeDoux have "virtually canonical status" insofar as matters of affect are generally considered under the umbrella term "cognitive." And that's where the impoverished Darwinian model promoted by Ekman and Damasio obscures more than it reveals (I critique "literary Darwinism" in chapter 4). A robust account of the social world is essential for our understanding of emotion, and therefore we are led astray by any parsimonious account of the social world where cognition is reduced to a bodily function. Instead, with Darwin I want to foreground a more appropriate rhetorical model of cognition where consciousness is situated in the brain-body-world nexus.

That's not to say cognitive approaches are impossible — indeed I offer my own alternative in this book which has certain affinities with the recent work of Terence Cave and Jonathan Kramnick, as well as Elaine Scarry and David Herman as I noted in the introduction. The issue is which cognitive approach, and which model of cognition. The critical works just mentioned and others like it might provide sensitive readings despite the impoverished model of consciousness at the core, but the returns are diminishing. In her lexical analysis of Shakespeare's plays (for instance, house and home in The Comedy of Errors), Mary Thomas Crane mobilizes the cognitive rhetorics of George Lakoff and Mark Turner while offering "a possible background" for Patricia Parker's cultural criticism of Shakespearean figures (SB, 33). But precisely at the point where Crane situates such familiar linguistic analyses against a cognitive science background the argument fails. Though a critic like Gail Kern Paster might productively scrutinize bodily experience in relation to discourse, she has, according to Crane, paid relatively little attention to the brain, "the material place within the body where discourse is processed and therefore where discursive construction, if it occurs, must be located" (SB, 7). But everything humans do can be located in the brain at some point, so the observation does not help us read Shakespeare any more than it helps us drive to the grocery store, which we also do thanks, in part, to our brain. Crane explains far too much with the brain: it is the "material site where discourse enters the body, where entry into the symbolic occurs, and therefore where the subject is constructed" (SB, 7). It is "is a material basis for a limited sense of 'essential' human attributes as well a space for individual arrangements of neurons" (SB, 23). So when it comes time to discuss Timothy Bright and Shakespeare on the processes behind emotional expression, for instance, Ekman lurks predictably in the background (see SB, 244n19), foreclosing cultural criticism in the spirit of Parker, except as a supplement. And what does literature do for us? The brain, according to Crane, "constitutes the material site where biology engages culture to produce the mind and its manifestation, the text" (SB, 35; emphasis added). Mind is thereby sequestered in a brain that recedes from culture to the point where a chasm must be bridged; hence the palliative work of literature and its criticism.

This brain-world dichotomy is common in cognitive approaches to literature, which provide the ostensible cure. After insightful analysis of the circus scene from The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where Twain invites the reader to reflect unsentimentally on his or her emotional experience as it unfolds (the work of "realism"), Thrailkill concludes with a metaphor of integrity assured by the surgical work of literature and its criticism: "Works of literary realism help us to realize that, when we read, we are all like Narcissus staring into a puddle: delighting in that 'extra you' who, far from being a solipsistic illusion, is a neurologically nested affective companion keeping us from our isolation by suturing us, body and mind, firmly to ourselves and to the world in which we live." And not surprisingly for Thrailkill this affective-cognitive achievement of literature relies explicitly on biological stability according to Darwin's Expression as filtered through Ekman: "Drawing in evolutionary theory, these emerging accounts suggest that while the cultural significance of feelings, along with rules about displaying them, may fluctuate over time, the actual corporeal architecture of emotional experience — almost universal to members of a species — has evolved so slowly over the course of millennia as to be, in a limited time frame of human history, practically stable." This, in turn, means the literary critic like Thrailkill can acknowledge cultural criticism as important but secondary, and then trump it with biological criticism with ostensibly wider reach. But Darwin himself is an equivocal ally in this project.

(Continues…)

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction Uncomfortable Situations

Chapter 1 Defending the Humanities with Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals

Chapter 2 Bearing Up in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African

Chapter 3 Hostile Environments in Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest

Chapter 4 Mixed Feelings in Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility

Epilogue Irreconcilable Differences?
(With Stephanie Preston)

Notes
Index
 

Editorial Reviews

Gross’s Uncomfortable Situations is a superlative achievement of interdisciplinary scholarship. Uncompromising in its commitment to the literary and rhetorical humanities, Gross takes on board the latest research on the neuroscience of emotion and situated cognition and puts the two into productive, sometimes uncomfortable dialogue. The result is non-reductionist cognitive literary study of the highest order. It should be read by everyone with an interest in the history of the emotions, in eighteenth-century sentimental and Gothic literature, and in the ecological humanities.

author of Actions and Objects from Hobbes to Richa Jonathan Kramnick

Gross is the go-to figure if one wants a thinker who refuses to compromise with reductionistic accounts (of the ‘Basic Emotions’ or ‘consilience’ varieties), but does not, for all that, refuse dialog. In Uncomfortable Situations he demonstrates convincingly that we can save the richness of texts without ruling out the potential of experimental methods.

author of The Making of Romantic Love William M. Reddy