nonconscious self-perception (unconscious self-reflection or self-referentiality).
It is the perception of this self-perception, its naming and making conscious,
that allows affect to be effectively analysed – as long as a vocabulary can be
found for that which is imperceptible but whose escape from perception
cannot but be perceived, as long as one is alive.
(Massumi 2002: 35–36, my emphasis)I want to foreground one last translation of affect which we might call
Darwinian. For Darwin, expressions of emotion were universal and are the product
of evolution. Neither our expressions nor our emotions are necessarily unique
to human beings. Other animals have some of the same emotions, and some of
the expressions produced by animals resemble our own. Expressions, which typically
involve the face and the voice, and to a lesser extent body posture and movement,
have a number of cross-cultural features. In contrast, gestures, which typically
involve hand movement, are not universal: generally, they vary from culture to
culture in the same way as language.
Though scientific work on emotions flourished, Darwin’s work on emotions
was all but ignored for one hundred years or so. However, it has recently enjoyed
something of a revival, associated in particular with the work of Ekman (1992,
2003; Ekman and Rosenberg 199 7 ). As Ekman has shown, Darwin’s work
was important for three reasons. First, it tried to answer the ‘why’ question: Why
are particular expressions associated with particular emotions? Second, it drew on
a large range of evidence, not only of a peculiar quantity (Darwin drew on a large
amount of international correspondents) but also of a peculiar quality: Darwin’s
use of engravings and photographs of the face, using a number of sources, has
become iconic. Third, there was his claim that there is a strong line of emotional
descent running from animals to humans, born out of the evolution of affective
expression as a means of preparing the organism for action, a claim arising in part
out of a desire to answer critics of evolution.
What Darwin omitted from his study was any communicative aspect of emotion
and it is this aspect which has been added in today. Flying in the face of total
cultural relativism, neo-Darwinians argue that there are at least five emotions which
are common to all cultures: anger, fear, sadness, disgust and enjoyment,^13 and that
each of these emotions is manifested in common facial expressions. These common
facial expressions are involuntary signs of internal physiological changes and not
just a part of the back-and-forth of the communicative repertoire. But this is
not to say that emotions operate like instincts, uninfluenced by cultural experience.
Communication has its say. ‘Social experience influences attitudes about emo-
tions, creates display and feeling rules, develops and tunes the particular occasions
which will most rapidly call forth an emotion’ (Ekman 1998: 38 7 ).^14 In particular,
different cultures may not have the same words for emotions or might explain
a particular emotion in a radically different way.^15 Further, the specific events that
trigger particular emotions can, of course, be quite different between cultures: for
example, disgust is triggered by quite different kinds of food according to cultural
norms of what is nice and nasty.
Spatialities of feeling 181