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Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical terrain on which the wider project is based. It begins by revisiting some of the founding tenets of critical theory in the context of the establishment of the Institute for Social Research in the early twentieth century. The chapter then discusses contemporary theories of affect that have emerged in the past couple of decades as part of the so-called ‘new materialisms’. Taking on board some of the key findings of this recent work on affect, the author also highlights the potential political deficiencies that accompany such accounts, particularly within a growing ‘post-critical’ context. The chapter closes with suggestions as to how early critical theory – read through an affective lens – might provide the social and political grounding that affect theory often lacks, while at the same time noting how theories of affect are invaluable in shedding light on the efficacy of the pre- or extra-rational, so often sacrificed on the altar of political philosophy.

This essay explores the difficulty of reconciling Spinoza’s ontological monism; his thesis that mind and body, extension and thought, are two different and mutually irreducible way of describing the universe; his insistence on the reality of the mental; and his denial of mind-body interaction. According to Spinoza, while a particular event described in one vocabulary may cause a particular event described in the other, a fully adequate explanation of a mental event cannot be given in physical terms and vice versa. This thesis is what Spinoza had in mind in denying mind-body interaction.

This chapter explores what the historian of science Ruth Leys has decried as the “nonintentionalism” of affect theory and its implications for critical feminist practices of judgment. To insist, as Leys does, on intentionalism as concept possession, does not adequately account for the fascination with nonconceptualism. Such fascination must be understood in relation to a wholly intellectualist view of conceptual rationality, according to which knowing how to do something involves a highly abstract and disembodied form of rule-following. Far from unique to affect theory, this view is shared by certain phenomenological philosophers and postfoundational feminist theorists who have been eager to recover the idea of human practice as a form of nonrational and nonconceptual embodied coping. Drawing on ordinary language philosophers such as Gilbert Ryle, Cavell, and Wittgenstein, the chapter seeks to uncover the misunderstandings that animate the turn to nonconceptualism as the only alternative to intellectualism.

This chapter presents a critique of affect theorists’ attempts to situate the novelty of their discourse in its separation from poststructuralist linguistic philosophies, a separation that takes the character of a disavowal rather than an observation. The chapter interrogates the construction of affect as a form of extra-linguistic excess, arguing that the ‘Nausicaa’ episode of Ulysses allows for a reconsideration of affect as a non-pure or non-originary state in its relation to modernity. Exploring the continuities between Roland Barthes’s elaboration of jouissance and contemporary descriptions of affect, the chapter considers Joyce’s novel as both a text of jouissance (understood by Barthes not as non-linguistic excess but rather as excess borne out of the signifying plurality of the text) and as a less radical text of plaisir, mimetic of affect. Ultimately, Ulysses refuses to separate literal and textual jouissance and posits the processual, unfixed, and material nature of language itself, thus challenging theories in which affect is formulated in opposition to (fixed) semiosis.

The introduction lays out this book’s methodology and main thesis. Spaces of Feeling takes modernist poems and novels as illustrations of an attitude toward affective awareness that has become lost from contemporary conversations about affect. By engaging with critics such as Lauren Berlant, Charles Altieri, Sianne Ngai, and Brian Massumi, as well as moral philosophers such as Martha Nussbaum, it also highlights reasons why this attitude should, once more, become important to us.

This paper explores the significance of Katherine Mansfield and Jean Rhys as colonial outsiders in the modernist metropolis of Paris. The paper draws upon a number of ideas from contemporary affect theory (such as work on the idea of shame) to present an original account of how, in texts such as ‘Je ne parle pas français’ and ‘Feuille d’Album’ (Mansfield) and Quartet (Rhys), both writers responded, in differing ways, to the moods of the modernist spaces of the city. It also discusses the importance of their engagement with the cultural institutions of modernism in Paris, such as that of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, and explores their shared connections to the French writer Francis Carco.

This chapter considers how Charles Darwin's meditations on pain complicate the optimism not just of his own historical moment but of some of the recent affect theory that claims to depend on his work. Specifically, Darwin's use of the idea of pain to ambiguate the relationship between the biological and the cultural, and to interrogate the basic unit of analysis, leads to a strange phenomenology in which it is often difficult to say who or what suffers: a person, a population, a species, or a limb. This chapter suggests the radical revision Darwin offers to any account of the social that naturalizes an autonomous subject as its starting point. It additionally indicates how Darwin's work on the expression of pain might prove useful for a renovated version of affect theory.

This chapter examines theoretical and academic literature situated at the intersection of European intellectual history and the history of sexuality. It suggests that the twentieth century in particular saw a heightened concentration of interest in the relationship between sexuality and knowledge, a concentration bookended by the apparently opposed orientations of Sigmund Freud and Michel Foucault. It maintains, however, that the seeming standoff between psychoanalytic and Foucauldian theory might have been overplayed, and that there might be meaningful overlap between the two in their intentional and unintentional moves to decenter sexuality as a privileged site of knowledge about subjectivity. The essay concludes with a brief turn to recent developments in affect theory that might contribute usefully to a further decentering of sexuality and, as a result, to the historicization of the psychoanalytic-Foucaultian polarization as a product of the twentieth century.

The conclusion presents some larger questions and opportunities raised by this argument. Spaces of Feeling revisits relatively old-fashioned subjective aspirations toward social exemplarity, autonomy, and self-knowledge in order to suggest that, even in this post-human day and age, it still takes us much effort to shed them. Through fictionalized and lyricized models of introspective thinkers beset by doubts about the speed, range, and independence of their inward reflections, it reframes our cognitive and affective liabilities as new points of entry into what we mean by self-awareness, and what our stakes are in attaching (or refusing to attach) value to it.

Unethical behaviors (e.g., stealing) are viewed more positively when they benefit someone other than the unethical actor. Scholars argue actors can use this “prosociality” effect to restore their identities after they engage in deviant actions. We investigate whether this interactional resource is more available to some categories of people than others. We use the intersectionality literature to discuss how combinations of race and gender might influence whether a prosocial unethical behavior is defined in negative or positive terms. We use affect control theory to generate hypotheses about when the intersectional identities will lead to more negative or positive evaluations and labeling of the actor and behavior. In an online experiment, we find that the evaluation and labeling of an actor are less affected by prosociality when he is a white male. Women of both races and men of color can restore their identities, but only by behaving in a completely prosocial way.

Emotion plays an important role in decision making and consumer behavior, and culture shapes different aspects of emotion. In the last decade, there has been extensive research on how individuals from Western cultures (e.g., American culture) and those from Eastern cultures (e.g., Chinese culture) differ on the type and intensity of emotions experienced. This chapter reviews existing literature on how such cultural differences in emotion impact decision-making and consumer behavior.

This chapter introduces the overall methodology and theoretical approach taken in the book, explaining the significance of the idea of the outsider in modernism. It then outlines the idea of the geographical emotions of modernism (drawing upon a term first coined by the writer Bryher). This is articulated by combining theories of literary geography with work on affect theory, mood, and emotion. Theorists drawn upon here include Silvan Tomkins, Henri Lefebvre, Raymond Williams, and Martin Heidegger. It argues for an understanding of modernism in these four European cities in terms of a regional transnationalism, situating this approach within current debates on global modernism. The chapter illustrates these arguments by a reading of Mulk Raj Anand’s Conversations in Bloomsbury.