The Brooklyn Rail

Omar Kholeif has asked me to reflect on how I, given my immersion in questions of individual and collective madness, feel about our ideas and images of feeling. In short, how do I feel about feeling?

My answer: ambivalence. I have mixed feelings about feeling as a concept, a phenomenon, an experience. Perhaps it is the vagueness, the indeterminacy of the word “feeling.” All I have to offer are questions. Is feeling a question of sensation and sentience, or sense and sensibility? Does it rely on a nervous system or a networked system? Does an earthworm feel something? No doubt. But does it “have feelings”? Doubtful. Recall Leonard Cohen’s confession in “Hallelujah”: “I couldn’t feel, so I learned to touch.” What is the relation between feeling something and having a feeling—not to mention feelings plural? Does one possess a feeling? Or do feelings possess us? Are the feelings we “have” the ones that make us what we are, or what we connect with? To what extent do we share feelings with others? What is a mutual feeling? What is a collective feeling? Are feelings contagious? Seems so, and most of crowd psychology agrees, from the society to the gathering, the mob, the crowd, the political party, the nation, the congregation, the jury, the army, the parliament, the audience, the player, the consumer, the organization, the army, the family, and the species. What have I left out? The feeling of belonging to a swarm, a herd, a horde, a flock, or a hive? If forests can think, can they also feel?¹ Whatever feelings are, they aren’t just the possession of individuals, but (as Raymond Williams argued) “structures of feeling” that we inhabit as a social environment, shared, disputed, and diagnosed.

How many distinct kinds of feelings are there? Omar has asked me to produce an atlas of feeling, a project akin to Aby Warburg’s attempt to gather all the world’s pathos formulae into his Bilderatlas or my own attempt to replace the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) with a CSM (Cultural and Symbolic Manual of Madness).² Like Warburg, I am suffering from the syndrome known as “apophenia.” This is the occupational hazard of the visual culture scholar, the desire to see everything at once and to find the pattern that reveals the hidden order of things. I call this “Atlas Fever” (an echo of Derrida’s “Archive Fever”) and it is a condition that mixes hope and fear in equal measure. Feelings are a) invisible and b) too numerous and evanescent to be listed, much less displayed in an atlas. Le Brun’s attempt to provide an array of legible facial expressions belongs to a long tradition of making feelings visible.

Place Le Brun next to Bill Viola’s slow-motion videos of facial expressions in Quintet of the Astonished (2000) and one sees how they fade, congeal, and metamorphose, as if we were reading a text that fades and transforms with every passing moment. Jim Borgman’s How Are You Feeling Today? (1989) stabilizes the array of facial expressions in therapeutic atlas for discovering or recognizing one’s mood or feeling without words, useful for talking with traumatized children. Or contrast it with Géricault’s portraits of the mad, and one realizes that feelings can be a prison, a fixed expression of rage, sadness, or distraction that verges on a static physiognomy. Perhaps more useful than an atlas would be methods for escaping from the prison of feelings.

Or consider Tina Post’s discussion of the mask of “inexpression” known as “deadpan,” the concealment of feelings from others, the deliberate cultivation of “flat affect” and non-committal inexpressiveness. What is the feeling of concealed feelings, of the eye contact that must be avoided, the possession by an inner rage that must be hidden? What is the feeling of being confronted by the inscrutability that is traditionally associated with Asian cultures, and cultivated as a survival tactic by the descendants of American slaves?

I want to resist Omar’s intuition that feeling is somehow replacing revolution as the current “feeling of the age.” For one thing, I believe that we are right now in the middle of a revolutionary epoch characterized by radically antithetical feelings of triumph and despair. As I write, fascism has arrived in the United States, complete with all its feelings of hate and resentment, along with its love of violence, its mad attachment to mass delusions and paranoid fantasies. The United States government and its Constitution are about to be reshaped by the same people who raised a violent insurrection on January 6, 2021, and continue to deny that it ever happened. Our only hope is that they bungle it so badly that they self-destruct. If they don’t, and Trump’s pardoned storm troopers evolve into a presidential militia or security force, we will experience a new iteration of Hitler’s Gestapo. That should keep the Capitol on edge.

“On edge” is precisely the shared feeling of seventy-nine million Americans who voted against Donald Trump, the sociopathic narcissist whose psychiatric profile is dominated by a complete lack of empathy or the ability to “feel with” other people, much less sympathize, which is just the ability to feel sorry for someone. We are now in the (American) age of an unfeeling sovereign and his passionate, deluded followers. As Raymond Williams famously argued, every age looks to define its dominant, emergent, and residual “structures of feeling.” The feelings of the times are thus always mixed, a complex of contradictory emotions. At a more fundamental level, human feelings tend to organize themselves in dialectical contraries. Their “mix” is an unstable blend of love and hate, delight and horror, hope and fear, calm and panic, mania and depression. The human species is, at bottom, a bipolar or multipolar animal group, experiencing its collective feelings in times of conflict and anarchistic disorder, or mass movements driven by rage and euphoria. We cannot assume that our big brains are endowed with evolutionary intelligence, the sort that drives adaptation to adverse circumstances. As a species, a planetary population group, we have created a world order that political scientist John Mearsheimer describes as an “iron cage” of violent antagonists engaged in endless wars. Neither human civilization nor “the humanities” can be taken for granted today.

And now we have invented forms of mechanical intelligence that can convincingly simulate and stimulate every human feeling while (so far as we know) feeling nothing themselves. Social media “platforms” are designed to maximize response by stimulating the disquieting emotions of anger, fear, surprise, and excitement, the goal (which is quickly monetized) being to capture and hold human attention and engagement.³ The addictive character of these feelings is notorious, locking users into feedback loops of mis- and dis-information.⁴ The gaslighting of whole populations has transformed the philosophical madness of Cartesian skepticism and its “Evil Demon” or Deus deceptor into a mass phenomenon. The unfeeling trolls of disinformation provide the perfect key to lock in delusional “alternate realities.” George Orwell’s Big Brother, tirelessly surveilling the masses with his telescreen while arousing them with spectacles and rituals of hate and love has been perfected. The richest man in the world has made an alliance with a psychopathic tyrant to usher in the new dark age of mad and bad feelings in which we are immersed.

What is to be done? Omar Kholeif proposes an antidote to this pathology: “the role of the critic is to create dreamspaces for and with artists … dreamspaces of empathy and exchange.” I have mixed feelings about this role for art and criticism. On the one hand, it promises to create utopian enclaves and real transformations of everyday life. The work of community-based artists like my colleague Theaster Gates is exemplary of this strategy. On the other hand, we also need an art that attempts to awaken our species from its dogmatic slumber in the nightmare world of our own creation. My other colleague, the performance artist, the late William Pope.L, practiced an art that Zachary Cahill has described as an “exploration of social horror.”⁵ Crawling the length of Broadway, exploring the haunted hallways of the Art Institute of Chicago, eating the Wall Street Journal, launching a “Whispering Campaign” at documenta, circulating enigmatic and sometimes shocking slogans (“Ignorance is a Virtue”; “Brown People are the Wrens in the Parking Lot”), Pope.L transformed real spaces into locations of empathy and exchange, like a clinician with his troop of interns, probing the wounds and taking the temperature of our world.

William Blake summarized the dialectic of feeling succinctly: “Hope and Fear are—Vision.” The visionary art and criticism we are hoping for in these dark times will most certainly explore these mixed feelings.