10 Turbulent passions
1 So, to take one just example:A disposition to irascibility does not just mean low tolerance for frustration, a
reaction or reactivity, but it also involves seeking frustrating situations in the
environment and perceiving them as frustrating. Who is not familiar with that? I
take a bus but I am in a bad mood, close to feeling like doing something terrible.
The bus is packed and the people in it are all in a bad mood as well, which only
makes mine worse. I reach the point of wanting to be elbowed and maybe putting
myself in a position where I might be elbowed, which would then allow me to let
all my anger and frustration of the day loose on some innocent bystander, who in
my mind is redefined as an ill-mannered jerk.
(Despret 200 4 : 9 4 –95)2 It is worth remembering that many classical social theorists did at the very least wrestle
with affect but then let it go by. Weber is a good example. Affect counts as one of his
forms of rationality but it is the least developed.
3 In other words, scale is not the issue. A ‘small’ node like a body, can, in certain
circumstances, exert as much agency as a much ‘larger’ entity.
4 This is a different claim from the one that these programmes are part of a universal
human nature which Despret (200 4 ) and others have rightly criticized. Rather, the
claim being made is the same as the claim that brown eyes are found in all or most
human populations and are a product of human evolution but are not thereby part of
a universal human nature: affect programmes display similar heritable variation within
populations (Griffiths 199 7 ). It would, in any case be difficult to argue that certain
affects can be found in all human cultures when the ethnographic evidence suggests
that such a viewpoint cannot be sustained. For example, anger does not seem to be
universal: thus both Tahitians and Utku Eskimos appear not to possess this quality
(though they recognize it well enough in other peoples).
5 Including, incidentally, a challenge to an assumed centre of a constituting consciousness
or a single body from which relations emerge, and by implication an attempt to move
beyond investment in a body which could be that of any subject whatsoever (and thus
beyond the differing intensities of affect); the striving to think space beyond its human
territory, and by implication an attempt to think a world with all kinds of actors’ powers,
and the project of sensing concepts and percepts beyond one’s own purview because
all other perceivers are no longer included in one’s own space and time, and by
implication an attempt to think different folds which play upon the intrinsic differences
of possible conceptions and perceptions.
6 A realization that has also underlined that the use of genetics is not necessarily genetic
determinism (cf. McKinnon and Silverman 2005).
7 For example, a few hundred generations are easily sufficient to bring a rare mutant allele
to dominance in a population, as in the case of lactose intolerance.
8 About 4 0 per cent of the energy of the human body is expended on digestion, compared
with about 10 per cent on locomotion. Thus cooking indirectly provides an enormous
extra reservoir of energy. Indeed the biological adaptation to cooking has been so great
that if humans consume only raw food they will suffer a major loss of energy with
substantial physiological consequences (e.g. in women, menstruation is halted). See,
for example, the recent work of Richard Wrangham (cf. Sterelny 2003: 110–112).
9 Pheromone: from the Greek pherein, meaning to carry or transfer, and hormõn, meaning
to excite or stimulate.
10 Although they can often be ‘eavesdropped’ by other species.
11 This is not far from one common definition of intelligence – a system is intelligent if its
behaviour furthers its uninterrupted existence.
Notes 275