Affectus or what we could call "experiential affect" is not representational, Deleuze remarks, "since it is experienced in a living duration that involves the difference between two states." As such an experience of difference, affectus is "purely transitive" (Deleuze 1988b: 49). In the main discussion of affect in ATP (313-4 / 256-7), DG do not maintain the Spinozist term "affection," but they do distinguish the relations of the extensive parts of a body (including the "modification" of those relations resulting from an encounter), which they call "longitude," from the intensities or bodily states that augment or diminish the body's "power to act [puissance d'agir]," which they call "latitude." In other words, the "latitude" of a body comprises the affects or the capacities to act and to be acted upon of which a body is capable at any one time in an assemblage. What are these "acts" of which a body is capable? Using one of the key terms of ATP, DG define affects as "becomings" or capacities to produce emergent effects in entering assemblages (Protevi 2006). These emergent effects will either mesh productively with the affects of the body, or clash with them. Meshing emergent effects will augment the power of that body to form other connections within or across assemblages, resulting in joyous affects, while clashing emergent effects will diminish the power to act of the body, producing sad affects.
For DG, knowledge of the affects of a body is all-important: "We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do [ce qu'il peut], in other words, what its affects are" (314 / 257). Affect is part of DG's dynamic interactional ontology, so that defining bodies in terms of affects or power to act and to undergo is different from reading them in terms of properties of substantive bodies by which they are arranged in species and genera (314 / 257). At this point in their text, DG illustrate the way affect is part of the process of assembling by reference to the relation between Little Hans and the horse in Freud's eponymous case study . While we will not do a thematic study of the horse in ATP, we should recall the prevalence of horses (alongside wolves and rats) in the discussions of affect in ATP: besides the Little Hans case, we also find the becoming-horse of the masochist being submitted to dressage (193 / 155), and of course the repeated analyses of man-horse assemblages in the Nomadology chapter (the stirrup, the chariot, etc.). We will return to the question of horse-man assemblages in ancient warfare, in particular to
a recent thesis whereby the defeat of the light chariot forces by berserker "runners" is the crucial factor in the defeat of Bronze Age kingdoms that mark the 1200 BCE collapse, leading to the eventual emergence of the polis / phalanx assemblage (Drews 1993).
Let us stay with the horse to illustrate affect as the capacity to become, to undergo the stresses inherent in forming a particular assemblage, by noting that in a grouping based on affect, a racehorse (carries a rider in a race; i.e., enters the racing assemblage) has more in common with a motorcycle than with a plow horse (pulls a tool that gouges the earth; i.e., enters the agricultural assemblage), which has more in common with a tractor.1 This is not to say that what is usually named a "plow horse" or "tractor" cannot be made to race, just as "race horses" and "motorcycles" can be made to pull plows. These affects as changes in the triggers and patterns of their behavior would, however, constitute another becoming or line of flight counter their usual, statistically normal ("molar") usages; it would constitute their enlistment in assemblages that tap different "machinic phyla" (bio-techno-social fields for the construction of assemblages [ATP 406-11]) and "diagrams" (the patterns that direct the construction of assemblages [ATP 141]) than the ones into which they are usually recruited. Whether or not the bodies involved could withstand the stresses they undergo is a matter of (one would hope careful) experimentation. Such experimentation establishing the affects of assemblages, the potentials for emergent functionality, is the very process of transcendental empiricism.
To recap, then, DG follow Spinoza, defining affect as a body's ability to act and to be acted upon, what it can do and what it can undergo. DG operationalize the notion of affect as the ability of bodies to form "assemblages" with other bodies, that is, to form emergent functional structures that conserve the heterogeneity of their components. For DG, then, "affect" is physiological, psychological, and machinic: it imbricates the social and the somatic in forming a "body politic" which feels its power or potential to act increasing or decreasing as it encounters other bodies politic and forms assemblages with them (or indeed fails to do so). In this notion of assemblage as emergent functional structure, that is, a dispersed system that enables focused behavior at the system level as it constrains component action, we find parallels with novel positions in contemporary cognitive science (the "embodied" or "extended" mind schools), which maintain that cognition operates in loops among brain, body, and environment (Clark 2003; Thompson 2007). In noting this parallel, we should note that DG emphasizes the affective dimension of assemblages, while the embodied-embedded school focuses on cognition. While we follow DG's lead and focus on the affective, we should remember that both affect and cognition are aspects of a single process, affective cognition, as the directed action of a living being in its world (Protevi 2009).
In discussing affect, we should note that DG place feeling as the subjective appropriation of affect. An example would be the way pleasure is for them the subjective appropriation of de-subjectizing joyous affect: "pleasure is an affection of a person or a subject; it is the only way for persons to 'find themselves' in the process of desire that exceeds them; pleasures, even the most artificial, are reterritorializations" (ATP 156). In the same way, our lead passage implies that "feeling" (sentiment) is the subject's appropriation of physiological-emotional changes of the body, the recognition that "this is me feeling this way." DG's point about affect's extension beyond subjective feeling dovetails with the analysis we will develop of extreme cases of rage and panic as triggering an evacuation of the subject as automatic responses take over; as we will put it, drastic episodes of rage and fear are de-subjectivizing. The agent of an action undertaken in a rage or panic state can be said to be the embodied "affect program" (Griffiths 1997) acting independently of the subject. Here we see affect freed from subjective feeling. There can be nocomplaints about eliminating the "first person" perspective in studying these episodes, because there is no "first person" operative in these cases. Agency and subjectivity are split; affect extends beyond feeling; the body does something, is the agent for an action, in the absence of a subject (Protevi 2008).
Let me give a brief example of research in social psychology that recognizes the ontology of affect in bodies politic, bodies that are socially constructed in "dialogue" with our shared genetic heritage. Nisbett and Cohen 1996 go below the conscious subject to examine physiological response, demonstrating that white males of the southern United States have markedly greater outputs of cortisol and testosterone in response to insults than a control group of northern white males (44-45). They go above the individual subject to examine social policy forms, showing that southern states have looser gun control laws, more lenient laws regarding the use of violence in defense of self and property, and more lenient practices regarding use of violence for social control (domestic violence, corporal punishment in schools, and capital punishment) (57-73). They also offer in passing some speculation as to the role played by slavery in the South in the constructing these bodies politic in which social institutions and somatic affect are intertwined and mutually reinforcing in diachronically developing and intensifying mutual reinforcement. No one should think that these Southern males have a significantly different genetic makeup from other groups (or better, that any genetic variation is larger within the group than is present between this group and others); the difference in reaction comes from the differences in bodies politic formed by different subjectification practices, that is, the differences in the way social practices have installed triggers and thresholds that activate the anger patterns we all share due to our common genetic heritage.
Thus, as we have seen, affect is inherently political: bodies are part of an eco-social matrix of other bodies, affecting them and being affected by them. As we will now see, important schools of biological thought accord with this notion of affect as bio-cultural.
BIOLOGY OF AFFECT. Let's first consider the neuroscience of affect. We'll focus on rage, as the triggering of this de-subjectizing affect was the target of constructions in the geo-bio-techno-affective assemblages of ancient warfare. Rage is a basic emotion, which is not to be confused with aggression, though it sometimes is at the root of aggressive behavior. A leading neuroscientist investigating rage is Jaak Panksepp, whose Affective Neuroscience (1998) is a standard textbook in the field. He argues that aggression is wider than anger (187), distinguishing at least two forms of "aggressive circuits" in mammalian brains: predation and rage (188). Predation is based in what Panksepp calls the "seeking" system, which is activated by physiological imbalances, those that can be experienced as hunger, thirst, or sexual need. In predatory hunting, based in seeking, the subject is still operative; there is an experience to hunting, we can experience "what it is like" to hunt. Now we must be careful about too strictly distinguishing predation and rage in the act of killing. Concrete episodes are most often blends of anger and predation; as one expert puts it: "Real-life encounters tend to yield eclectic admixtures, composites of goal and rage, purpose and hate, reason and feeling, rationality and irrationality. Instrumental and hostile violence are not only kinds of violence, but also violence qualities or components" (Toch 1992:1-2; italics in original).Although in many cases we find composites of brute rage and purposeful predation, we can isolate, at least theoretically, the pure state or "blind rage" in which the subject drops out. We take the Viking "berserker rage" as a prototype, a particularly intense expression of the underlying neurological rage circuits that evacuates subjectivity and results in a sort of killing frenzy without conscious control. The notion of a blind, de-subjectified, rage is confirmed by Panksepp's analysis of the "hierarchical" architecture of the neural circuits involved: "the core of the RAGE system runs from the medial amygdaloid areas downward, largely via the stria terminalis to the medial hypothalamus, and from there to specific locations with the PAG [periaqueductal gray] of the midbrain. This system is organized hierarchically, meaning that aggression evoked from the amygdala is critically dependent on the lower regions, while aggression from lower sites does not depend critically on the integrity of the higher areas" (Panksepp 1998: 196). We must admit that there are huge issues here with the relation of Panksepp's anatomical focus on specific circuits and neurodynamical approaches which stress that the activity of multiple brain regions are involved in the activation of any one brain function; this anatomy versus dynamics relation must itself be seen in the historical context of the perennial localist versus globalist debate. We are in no position to intervene in these most complex issues, but we should note that Panksepp's notion of hierarchical circuits does allow for the possibility that "higher areas provide subtle refinements to the orchestration that is elaborated in the PAG of the mesencephalon [midbrain]. For instance, various irritating perceptions probably get transmitted into the system via thalamic and cortical inputs to the medial amygdala" (196-7). While these "irritating perceptions" may simply stoke the system to ever-greater heights of rage, we do need to allow that in some cases conscious control can reassert itself. Nonetheless, Panksepp's basic approach, as well as the volumes of warrior testimony about the berserker rage (Shay 1995 being only the tip of the iceberg), licenses our description of the "pure" berserker rage as "blind" and de-subjectified.
Now it is not that the Viking culture somehow presented simply a stage for the playing out of these neurological circuits. To provoke the berserker rage, the Vikings, through a variety of training practices embedded in their customs, distributed traits for triggering the berserker process throughout their population. Presumably, they underwent an evolutionary process in which success in raiding undertaken in the berserker frenzy provided a selection pressure for isolating and improving these practices. (We will return to the question of cultural evolution below; for the moment, please note that I am not implying that genes were the target of that
selection pressure.) In other words, the Vikings explored the bio-social machinic phylum for rage triggering in their military assemblages. While one researcher cites possible mushroom ingestion as a contributing factor (Fabing 1956), we will later focus on the role of dance and song in triggering the berserker state. In his important 1995 work, Keeping Together in Time: Dance and Drill in Human History, the noted history William McNeill notes that "war dances" produced a "heightened excitement" that contributed to the "reckless attacks" of the "Viking berserkers" (McNeill 1995: 102; see also Speidel 2002: 276).
There is no denying that the social meaning of blind rages differs across cultures—how they are interpreted by others and by self after waking up—as do their triggers and thresholds (Mallon and Stich 2000). But I think it is important to rescue a minimal notion of human nature from extreme social constructivism and hold that the rage pattern is the same in some important sense across cultures, given variation in genetic inheritances, environmental input, and developmental plasticity. Even with all that variation, there is remarkable similarity in what a full rage looks like, though how much it takes to get there, and what the intermediate anger episodes look like ("emotion scripts" [Parkinson et al. 2005]) can differ widely. Even James Averill, a leading social constructivist when it comes to emotion, relates "running amok" in Southeast Asian societies to Viking berserker rages. Averill writes: "Aggressive frenzies are, of course, found in many different cultures (e.g., the 'berserk' reaction attributed to old Norse warriors), but amok is probably the most studied of these syndromes" (Averill 1982: 59; italics in original). It is the very commonality of "aggressive frenzies" that we are after in our notion of "rage pattern."
I propose that in extreme cases of rage a modular agent replaces the subject with what is called an "affect program," that is, an emotional response that is "complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction" (Griffiths 1997: 77). Affect programs (panic is another example) are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor's notion of modularity, which calls for a module to be "mandatory … opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes producing them] … and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access that in other modules]" (93; my comments in brackets). Perhaps second only to the question of adaptationism for the amount of controversy it has evoked, the use of the concept of modularity in evolutionary psychology is bitterly contested.2 I feel relatively safe proposing a rage module or rage agent, since its adaptive value is widely attested to by its presence in other mammals, and since Panksepp is able to cites studies of direct electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous rage circuits in humans and other mammalian species (Panksepp 1998: 190).3 Panksepp proposes as adaptive reasons for rage agents their utility in predator-prey relations, further sharpening the difference between rage and predator aggression. While a hunting attack is by definition an instance of predatory aggression, rage reactions are a prey phenomenon, a vigorous reaction when pinned down by a predator. Initially a reflex, Panksepp claims, it developed into a full-fledged neural phenomenon with its own circuits (190). The evolutionary inheritance of rage patterns is confirmed by the well-attested fact that infants can become enraged by having their arms pinned to their sides (189).
Now that we have seen now neuroscientists discuss rage, and broached the issues of the unit of selection in cultural evolution and those of modularity and adaptationism in evolutionary psychology, we have to insist right now that we cannot think bodies politic as mere input / output machines passively patterned by their environment (that way lies a discredited social constructivism) or passively programmed by their genes (an equally discredited genetic determinism). We thus turn to an important school of thought in contemporary critical biology, "developmental systems theory" (DST), which is taken from the writings of Richard Lewontin (2002), Susan Oyama (2000), Paul Griffiths and Russell Gray (Griffiths and Gray 1997, 2001, 2004, 2005) and others (Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray 2001). With the help of this new critical biology we can see the body politic as neither a simple blank slate nor a determined mechanism, but as biologically open to the subjectification practices it undergoes in its cultural embedding, practices that work with the broad contours provided by the genetic contribution to development to install culturally variant triggers and thresholds to the basic patterns that are our common heritage. Griffiths uses the example of fear to make this point, but the same holds for the basic emotion of rage we discussed above. "The empirical evidence suggests that in humans the actual fear response – the output side of fear – is an outcome of very coarse-grained selection, since it responds to danger of all kinds. The emotional appraisal mechanism for fear – the input side – seems to have been shaped by a combination of very fine-grained selection, since it is primed to respond to crude snake-like gestalts, and selection for developmental plasticity, since very few stimuli elicit fear without relevant experience" (Griffiths 2007: 204).
DST is a primarily a reaction to genetic determinism or reductionism. Genetic determinism is an ontological thesis proposing that genes are the sole source of order of (that is, that genes determine) physiological and developmental processes, beginning with protein synthesis and extending upward to organic, systemic, and organismic processes. No one has ever upheld such an absolute position if by that one means epigenetic conditions have no influence whatsoever, that developmental and physiological processes are determined the way a stone is determined to fall by gravity. The real target of critique by DST thinkers is the idea that there are two classes of developmental resources, genetic and epigenetic, and that genes provide the information or blue-print or plan or program, such that the epigenetic resources are the materials or background upon which and / or in which genes act (Oyama 2000; Griffiths and Gray 2001, 2004). The real question of so-called genetic determinism, then, is the locus of control rather than absolute determination.
Genetic reductionism is an epistemological issue. It's my impression that many practicing biologists think of reductionism as asking the question: can the portion of physiology and development due to genetic control be considered separately from the portion due to epigenetic influences?4 The DST response to this question is known as the "parity thesis" (Oyama 2000; Griffiths and Gray 2001, 2004), which rests upon the idea that there is a distributed system with both genetic and epigenetic factors (e.g., at least cell conditions and relative cell position) that controls gene expression and protein synthesis. It's a mistake however to attribute portions of control to components of that system, such that one could isolate the portion of genetic control. That would be analogous to saying that prisoners are partially under the control of the guards, when it would be better to say they are under the control of the prison system in which guards play a role (alongside architectural, technological, and administrative components). In the view of Griffiths and Gray, the undeniable empirical differences in the roles played by DNA and by non-DNA factors does not support the metaphysical decision to create two classes of developmental resources, nor the additional move to posit genes as the locus of control and epigenetic factors as background, as matter to be molded by the "information" supposedly carried in genes (Griffiths and Gray 2001, 2004).
A second key notion for DST thinkers is "niche-construction." Rather than seeing evolution as the adaptation of organisms to independently changing environments (the organism thus being reactive), DST follows Richard Lewontin (2002) and others in focusing on the way organisms actively shape the environment they live in and in which their offspring will live. They thus play a role in selecting which environmental factors are most important for them and their offspring. Thus evolution should be seen not simply as the change in gene frequency (a mere "bookkeeping" perspective) but as the change in organism-environment systems, that is, the organism in its constructed niche (Griffiths and Gray 2005). Allied with niche-construction, a third key notion of DST is that the "life cycle" should be considered the unit of development and evolution. For DST adherents, the developmental system considered in an evolutionary perspective is the widest possible extension of developmental resources that are reliably present (or better, re-created) across generations. The "life cycle" considered in an evolutionary perspective is the series of events caused by this developmental matrix that recurs in each generation (Griffiths and Gray 1997, 2001, 2004). The evolutionary perspective on the developmental system and life cycle is thus different from the individual perspective, where events need not recur: a singular event might play a crucial role in the development of any one individual, but unless it reliably recurs, it will not have a role in evolution; DST thus avoids the specter of Lamarckism. In their evolutionary thinking, DST thinkers extend the notion of epigenetic inheritance from the intra-nuclear factors of chromatin markings to the cytoplasmic environment of the egg (an extension many mainstream biologists have come to accept) and beyond to intra-organismic and even (most controversially) to extra-somatic factors, that is, to the relevant, constructed, features of the physical and social environments (for example, normal [i.e., species-typical] brain development in humans needs language exposure in critical sensitive windows) (Griffiths and Gray 1997, 2001, 2004; Jablonka and Lamb 2005).
Such a maximal extension of the developmental system raises the methodological hackles of many biologists, as it seems suspiciously holistic. These methodological reflections remain among the most controversial in contemporary philosophy of science. It would take us too far afield to explore fully all the implications of these debates, but we can see them as well in the background of the notions of developmental plasticity and environmental co-constitution found in West-Eberhard 2003. That the development of organisms is "plastic" and "co-constituted" with its environment means that it is not the simple working out of a genetic program. Rather, development involves a range of response capacities depending on the developing system's exposure to different environmental factors, just as those responses feed back to change the environment in niche-construction. Thus the notion of developmental plasticity displaces gene-centric notions of programmed development just as organism-environment co-constitution displaces notions of gene-centric natural selection in favor of a notion of multiple levels of selection.
We cannot enter the details of the controversy surrounding the notion of multiple levels of selection here, but we can at least sketch the main issues surrounding the notion of group selection, which plays a key role in any notion of bio-cultural evolution (Sober and Wilson 1999; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999; Jablonka and Lamb 2005; Joyce 2006). In considering the notion of group selection we find two main issues: emergence and altruism. If groups can have functional organization in the same way individuals do, that is, if groups can be emergent individuals, then groups can also be vehicles for selection. For example, groups that cooperate better may have out-reproduced those which did not. The crucial question is the replicator, the ultimate target of the selection pressures: again, for our purposes, the unit of selection is not the gene or the meme (a discrete unit of cultural "information"), but the set of practices for forming bodies politic. With the co-operation necessary for group selection, we must discuss the notion of "altruism" or more precisely, the seeming paradox of "fitness-sacrificing behavior." It would seem that natural selection would weed out dispositions leading to behaviors that sacrifice individual fitness (defined as always as the frequency of reproduction). The famous answer that seemed to put paid to the notion of group selection came in the concept of ―kin selection.‖ The idea here is that if you sacrifice yourself for a kin, at least part of your genotype, the ―altruistic‖ part that determines or at least influences self-sacrifice and that is [probably] shared with that kin, is passed on. But again, all the preceding discussion operates at the genetic level. We will claim that the ultimate target of selection pressure in group selection is the set of social practices reliably producing a certain trait by working with our genetic heritage. This need not have any implications for genetic fitness-sacrificing in group selection, if we restrict ourselves to bodies politic and the social practices for promoting behavior leading to increased group fitness. In other words, we are concerned with the variable cultural setting of triggers and thresholds for minimally genetically guided basic patterns.
The important thing for our purposes here is the emphasis DST places on the life cycle, developmental plasticity and environmental co-constitution. In following these thinkers, we can replace the controversial term "innate" with (the admittedly equally controversial) "reliably produced given certain environmental factors." In so doing, we have room to analyze differential patterns in societies that bring forth important differences from common endowments. In other words, we don't genetically inherit a subject, but we do inherit the potential to develop a subject when it is called forth by cultural practices. It is precisely the various types of subject called forth (the distribution of cognitive and affective patterns, thresholds, and triggers in a given population) that is to be analyzed in the study of the history of affect.
HISTORY OF AFFECT. We have seen how DST enables us to explore the bio-cultural dimension of bodies politic by thematizing extrasomatic inheritance as whatever is reliably reproduced in the next life cycle. Thus with humans we're into realm of bio-cultural evolution, with all its complexity and debates.5 We have to remember that the unit of selection here is not purely and simply genetic (indeed, for the most part genes are unaffected by cultural evolution, the classical instances of lactose tolerance and sickle-cell anemia notwithstanding), but should be seen as sets of cultural practices, thought in terms of their ability to produce affective cognitive structures (tendencies to react to categories of events) by tinkering with broadly genetically guided neuro-endocrine developmental processes.6
Regarding historically formed and culturally variable affective cognition, I work with Damasio's framework for the most part (Damasio 1995; 1999; 2003). Brain and body communicate neurologically and chemically in forming "somatic markers," which correlate or tag changes in the characteristic profile of body changes with the encounters, that is, changes in the characteristic profile of body-world interactions, which provoke them. Somatic markers are formed via a complex process involving brain-body-environment interaction, in which the brain receives signals from the body, from brain maps of body sectors, and from its own internal self-monitoring sectors. Thus the brain synthesizes how the world is changing (sensory input, which is only a modulation on ongoing processes), how the body is being affected by the world's changing (proprioception or "somatic mapping," again, a modulation of ongoing processes), and how the brain's endogenous dynamics are changing (modulation of ongoing internal neurological traffic or "meta-representations"). This synthesis sets up the capacity to experience a feeling of how the body would be affected were it to perform a certain action and hence be affected in turn by the world (off-line imaging, that is, modulation of the ongoing stream of "somatic markers"). I cannot detail the argument here, but a neurodynamical reading of Damasio's framework is broadly consonant with the Deleuzean emphasis on differential relations, that is, the linkage of rates of change of neural firing patterns, and on their integration at certain critical thresholds, resulting in "resonant cell assemblies" (Varela 1995) or their equivalent (Kelso 1995; Edelman and Tononi 2000). The key is that the history of bodily experience is what sets up a somatic marker profile; in other words, the affective cognition profile of bodies politic is embodied and historical.7
With this background, we see the limitations of much of the controversy around "cultural evolution" are due to the assumption that "information transfer" is the target for investigation (Runcimann 2005a: 13). But the notions of "meme" and "information transfer" founders on DST's critique – it's not a formed unit of information that we're after, but a process of guiding the production of dispositions to form somatic markers in particularly culturally informed ways. We have to think of ourselves as bio-cultural, with minimal genetically guided psychological modularity (reliably reproduced across cultures) and with a great deal of plasticity allowing for bio-cultural variance in forming our intuitions (Haidt 2001; Wexler 2006). In other words, we have to study political physiology, defined as the study of the production of the variance in affective cognitive triggers and thresholds in bodies politic, based on some minimally shared basic patterns.
All this means we can't assume an abstract affective cognitive subject but have to investigate the history of affect. But, the objection might go, don't we thereby risk leaving philosophy and entering historical anthropology? Answer: we only "leave" philosophy to enter history if we've surreptitiously defined philosophy ahead of time as ahistorical. Well, then, don't we leave philosophy and enter psychology? Answer: only if we've defined philosophy as concerned solely with universal structures of affective cognition. But that's the nub of the argument: the abstraction needed to reach the universally "human" (as opposed to the historically variant) is at heart anti-biological. Our biology makes humans essentially open to our cultural imprinting; our nature is to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature. But just saying that is typological thinking, concerned with "the" (universal) human realm; we need to bring concrete biological thought into philosophy. It's the variations in and across populations which are real; the type is an abstraction.
Having said all that, we must be clear that we are targeting variation in the subjectification practices producing variable triggers and thresholds of shared basic patterns. Now almost all of us reliably develop a set of basic emotions (rage, sadness, joy, fear, distaste) we share with a good number of reasonably complex mammals (Panksepp 1999). Many of us also have robust and reliable prosocial emotions (fairness, gratitude, punishment – shame and guilt are controversial cases) we share with primates, given certain basic and very wide-spread socializing inputs (De Waal 2005; Joyce 2006). Although some cultural practices can try to expand the reach of prosocial emotions to all humans or even all sentient creatures (with all sorts of stops in between), in many sets of cultural practices, these prosocial emotions are partial and local (Hume's starting point in talking about the ―moral sentiments‖). Why is the partiality of prosocial emotions a ―default setting‖ for sets of bio-cultural practices? One hypothesis is that war has been a selection pressure in bio-cultural evolution, operating at the level of group selection and producing very strong in-group versus out-group distinctions and very strong rewards / punishments for in-group conformity (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 2003).
There are difficult issues here concerning group selection and the unit of selection (Dawson 1999), but even if we can avoid the genetic level and focus on group selection for sets of social practices producing prosocial behaviors, we must still take into account a bitter controversy in anthropology about the alleged universality of warfare in human evolution and history (for a brief review of the literature from the anti-universalist position, see Sponsel 2000; for a book-length statement of the universalist position, see Otterbein 2004). There are three elements to consider here: the biological, the archaeological, and the ethnographic. (1) Regarding the biological, an important first step is to distinguish human war from chimpanzee male coalition and aggressive hierarchy, in short, the humans as "killer ape" hypothesis (Peterson and Wrangham 1997). Several researchers point out that we are just as genetically related to bonobos, who are behaviorally very different from chimpanzees (DeWaal 2006: 73; Fry 2007; see also Ferguson 2008). (2) Proponents of universal war often point to the archaeological record (Keeley 1997). Critics reply that claims of war damaged skulls are more plausibly accounted for by animal attacks (Fry 2007: 43). (3) Finally, we must couple the archaeological record with the current ethnographic record. But to do that we must distinguish simple hunter-gatherer (forager) bands from more complex hunter-gatherer tribes (with chiefs). The former have murder and revenge killing and / or group "executions" (sometimes by kin of the killer – weeding out the mad dogs), but not feuding or the "logic of social substitutability" which enables warfare (Kelly 2000; Fry 2007). We also have to look to current tribal warfare in the context of Western contact and territorial constriction and / or rivalry over trading rights (Sponsel 2000; Ferguson 1995).
The question would be how much war was needed to form an effective selection pressure for strong in-group identification and hence partiality of pro-social emotions? Richerson and Boyd argue that between group imitation can also be a factor in spreading cultural variants (2005: 209-10). Richerson and Boyd cite the example of early Christianity, where the selection pressure for subjectificaiton practices of "brotherhood" and hence care for the poor and sick was the high rate of epidemics in the Roman Empire. So war need not be the only selection pressure, nor does group destruction and assimilation of losers have to be the only means of transmitting cultural variants. We will assume in the following section that we haven't had time for selection pressures on genes with regard to warfare (Dawson 1999). But we have had time for selection pressures on bio-cultural subjectification practices relative to warfare, that is, for example, how to entrain a marching phalanx versus how to trigger berserker rage.
If war was a selection pressure on group subjectification practices for forming different bodies politic, we have to consider the history of warfare. With complex tribal warfare, you get loose groups of warriors with charismatic leaders (Clastres 1989). Virtually all the males of the tribe take part in this type of warfare; IOW, there is no professional warrior class / caste, except in certain rare cases. The argument of Fry 2007 is that the Chagnon / Clastres school, which focuses on the Yanomami as prototypical "primitive" warriors, picked complex horticultural hunter-gatherers and missed the even more basic simple foragers, who represented the vast majority of human history. But that's okay, because we're not talking about genes, but about bio-cultural evolution, about group selection of affective practices. So we don't have to claim warfare is in our genes; we need only investigate the geo-bio-affective group subjectification practices, once warfare is widespread. And I accept that this spread is post-agriculture, even for complex tribal "primitive" societies, who have always had States on their horizon (both immanently as that which is warded off, and externally, as that which is fought against; again, see Ferguson 1995 for a political history of Yanomami warfare).
This tribal egalitarianism changes with agriculture and class society. We need not enter DG's "anti-evolution" argument and the notion of the Urstaat, though we can note some fascinating new research which broadly supports their claim, derived from Jane Jacobs (1970), of the urban origins of agriculture (Balter 1998; but see the nuanced multiple-origins account in Pringle 1998). Consider thus the situation in Homer: we see vast differences between the affective structures of the warriors (bravery), the peasants (docility) who support them, the artisans who supply the arms (diligence), and the bards who sing their praises and who thus reinforce the affective structures of the warriors: the feeling that your name will live on if you perform bravely is vey important. Thus here the selection pressure is for sets of bio-cultural practices producing specialized affective structures relative to position in society, that is, relative to their contribution to the effectiveness of wars fought by that society. Once again, our concern is with the bio-cultural production of bodies politic, which tries to reliably produce bio-affective states. The triumph of hoplite warfare marks a shift in bio-cultural production. Compare Aristotle's golden mean of courage with what the Homeric warriors meant by courage. For Aristotle, courage means staying in the phalanx with your mates: charging ahead rashly is as much a fault as cowardly retreat (Nicomachean Ethics E 3.7.1115a30; b25-30; cf. Hanson 1989: 168). But for the Homeric heroes, charging ahead rashly is all there is.
There is no denying that the social meaning of blind rages differs across cultures—how they are interpreted by others and by self after waking up—as do their triggers and thresholds (Mallon and Stich 2000). But I think it is important to rescue a minimal notion of human nature from extreme social constructivism and hold that the rage pattern is the same in some important sense across cultures, given variation in genetic inheritances, environmental input, and developmental plasticity. Even with all that variation, there is remarkable similarity in what a full rage looks like, though how much it takes to get there, and what the intermediate anger episodes look like ("emotion scripts" [Parkinson et al. 2005]) can differ widely. Even James Averill, a leading social constructivist when it comes to emotion, relates "running amok" in Southeast Asian societies to Viking berserker rages. Averill writes: "Aggressive frenzies are, of course, found in many different cultures (e.g., the 'berserk' reaction attributed to old Norse warriors), but amok is probably the most studied of these syndromes" (Averill 1982: 59; italics in original). It is the very commonality of "aggressive frenzies" that we are after in our notion of "rage pattern."
I propose that in extreme cases of rage a modular agent replaces the subject with what is called an "affect program," that is, an emotional response that is "complex, coordinated, and automated … unfold[ing] in this coordinated fashion without the need for conscious direction" (Griffiths 1997: 77). Affect programs (panic is another example) are more than reflexes, but they are triggered well before any cortical processing can take place (though later cortical appraisals can dampen or accelerate the affect program). Griffiths makes the case that affect programs should be seen in light of Fodor's notion of modularity, which calls for a module to be "mandatory … opaque [we are aware of outputs but not the processes producing them] … and informationally encapsulated [the information in a module cannot access that in other modules]" (93; my comments in brackets). Perhaps second only to the question of adaptationism for the amount of controversy it has evoked, the use of the concept of modularity in evolutionary psychology is bitterly contested.2 I feel relatively safe proposing a rage module or rage agent, since its adaptive value is widely attested to by its presence in other mammals, and since Panksepp is able to cites studies of direct electrical stimulation of the brain (ESB) and neurochemical manipulation as identifying homologous rage circuits in humans and other mammalian species (Panksepp 1998: 190).3 Panksepp proposes as adaptive reasons for rage agents their utility in predator-prey relations, further sharpening the difference between rage and predator aggression. While a hunting attack is by definition an instance of predatory aggression, rage reactions are a prey phenomenon, a vigorous reaction when pinned down by a predator. Initially a reflex, Panksepp claims, it developed into a full-fledged neural phenomenon with its own circuits (190). The evolutionary inheritance of rage patterns is confirmed by the well-attested fact that infants can become enraged by having their arms pinned to their sides (189).
Now that we have seen now neuroscientists discuss rage, and broached the issues of the unit of selection in cultural evolution and those of modularity and adaptationism in evolutionary psychology, we have to insist right now that we cannot think bodies politic as mere input / output machines passively patterned by their environment (that way lies a discredited social constructivism) or passively programmed by their genes (an equally discredited genetic determinism). We thus turn to an important school of thought in contemporary critical biology, "developmental systems theory" (DST), which is taken from the writings of Richard Lewontin (2002), Susan Oyama (2000), Paul Griffiths and Russell Gray (Griffiths and Gray 1997, 2001, 2004, 2005) and others (Oyama, Griffiths, and Gray 2001). With the help of this new critical biology we can see the body politic as neither a simple blank slate nor a determined mechanism, but as biologically open to the subjectification practices it undergoes in its cultural embedding, practices that work with the broad contours provided by the genetic contribution to development to install culturally variant triggers and thresholds to the basic patterns that are our common heritage. Griffiths uses the example of fear to make this point, but the same holds for the basic emotion of rage we discussed above. "The empirical evidence suggests that in humans the actual fear response – the output side of fear – is an outcome of very coarse-grained selection, since it responds to danger of all kinds. The emotional appraisal mechanism for fear – the input side – seems to have been shaped by a combination of very fine-grained selection, since it is primed to respond to crude snake-like gestalts, and selection for developmental plasticity, since very few stimuli elicit fear without relevant experience" (Griffiths 2007: 204).
DST is a primarily a reaction to genetic determinism or reductionism. Genetic determinism is an ontological thesis proposing that genes are the sole source of order of (that is, that genes determine) physiological and developmental processes, beginning with protein synthesis and extending upward to organic, systemic, and organismic processes. No one has ever upheld such an absolute position if by that one means epigenetic conditions have no influence whatsoever, that developmental and physiological processes are determined the way a stone is determined to fall by gravity. The real target of critique by DST thinkers is the idea that there are two classes of developmental resources, genetic and epigenetic, and that genes provide the information or blue-print or plan or program, such that the epigenetic resources are the materials or background upon which and / or in which genes act (Oyama 2000; Griffiths and Gray 2001, 2004). The real question of so-called genetic determinism, then, is the locus of control rather than absolute determination.
Genetic reductionism is an epistemological issue. It's my impression that many practicing biologists think of reductionism as asking the question: can the portion of physiology and development due to genetic control be considered separately from the portion due to epigenetic influences?4 The DST response to this question is known as the "parity thesis" (Oyama 2000; Griffiths and Gray 2001, 2004), which rests upon the idea that there is a distributed system with both genetic and epigenetic factors (e.g., at least cell conditions and relative cell position) that controls gene expression and protein synthesis. It's a mistake however to attribute portions of control to components of that system, such that one could isolate the portion of genetic control. That would be analogous to saying that prisoners are partially under the control of the guards, when it would be better to say they are under the control of the prison system in which guards play a role (alongside architectural, technological, and administrative components). In the view of Griffiths and Gray, the undeniable empirical differences in the roles played by DNA and by non-DNA factors does not support the metaphysical decision to create two classes of developmental resources, nor the additional move to posit genes as the locus of control and epigenetic factors as background, as matter to be molded by the "information" supposedly carried in genes (Griffiths and Gray 2001, 2004).
A second key notion for DST thinkers is "niche-construction." Rather than seeing evolution as the adaptation of organisms to independently changing environments (the organism thus being reactive), DST follows Richard Lewontin (2002) and others in focusing on the way organisms actively shape the environment they live in and in which their offspring will live. They thus play a role in selecting which environmental factors are most important for them and their offspring. Thus evolution should be seen not simply as the change in gene frequency (a mere "bookkeeping" perspective) but as the change in organism-environment systems, that is, the organism in its constructed niche (Griffiths and Gray 2005). Allied with niche-construction, a third key notion of DST is that the "life cycle" should be considered the unit of development and evolution. For DST adherents, the developmental system considered in an evolutionary perspective is the widest possible extension of developmental resources that are reliably present (or better, re-created) across generations. The "life cycle" considered in an evolutionary perspective is the series of events caused by this developmental matrix that recurs in each generation (Griffiths and Gray 1997, 2001, 2004). The evolutionary perspective on the developmental system and life cycle is thus different from the individual perspective, where events need not recur: a singular event might play a crucial role in the development of any one individual, but unless it reliably recurs, it will not have a role in evolution; DST thus avoids the specter of Lamarckism. In their evolutionary thinking, DST thinkers extend the notion of epigenetic inheritance from the intra-nuclear factors of chromatin markings to the cytoplasmic environment of the egg (an extension many mainstream biologists have come to accept) and beyond to intra-organismic and even (most controversially) to extra-somatic factors, that is, to the relevant, constructed, features of the physical and social environments (for example, normal [i.e., species-typical] brain development in humans needs language exposure in critical sensitive windows) (Griffiths and Gray 1997, 2001, 2004; Jablonka and Lamb 2005).
Such a maximal extension of the developmental system raises the methodological hackles of many biologists, as it seems suspiciously holistic. These methodological reflections remain among the most controversial in contemporary philosophy of science. It would take us too far afield to explore fully all the implications of these debates, but we can see them as well in the background of the notions of developmental plasticity and environmental co-constitution found in West-Eberhard 2003. That the development of organisms is "plastic" and "co-constituted" with its environment means that it is not the simple working out of a genetic program. Rather, development involves a range of response capacities depending on the developing system's exposure to different environmental factors, just as those responses feed back to change the environment in niche-construction. Thus the notion of developmental plasticity displaces gene-centric notions of programmed development just as organism-environment co-constitution displaces notions of gene-centric natural selection in favor of a notion of multiple levels of selection.
We cannot enter the details of the controversy surrounding the notion of multiple levels of selection here, but we can at least sketch the main issues surrounding the notion of group selection, which plays a key role in any notion of bio-cultural evolution (Sober and Wilson 1999; Sterelny and Griffiths 1999; Jablonka and Lamb 2005; Joyce 2006). In considering the notion of group selection we find two main issues: emergence and altruism. If groups can have functional organization in the same way individuals do, that is, if groups can be emergent individuals, then groups can also be vehicles for selection. For example, groups that cooperate better may have out-reproduced those which did not. The crucial question is the replicator, the ultimate target of the selection pressures: again, for our purposes, the unit of selection is not the gene or the meme (a discrete unit of cultural "information"), but the set of practices for forming bodies politic. With the co-operation necessary for group selection, we must discuss the notion of "altruism" or more precisely, the seeming paradox of "fitness-sacrificing behavior." It would seem that natural selection would weed out dispositions leading to behaviors that sacrifice individual fitness (defined as always as the frequency of reproduction). The famous answer that seemed to put paid to the notion of group selection came in the concept of ―kin selection.‖ The idea here is that if you sacrifice yourself for a kin, at least part of your genotype, the ―altruistic‖ part that determines or at least influences self-sacrifice and that is [probably] shared with that kin, is passed on. But again, all the preceding discussion operates at the genetic level. We will claim that the ultimate target of selection pressure in group selection is the set of social practices reliably producing a certain trait by working with our genetic heritage. This need not have any implications for genetic fitness-sacrificing in group selection, if we restrict ourselves to bodies politic and the social practices for promoting behavior leading to increased group fitness. In other words, we are concerned with the variable cultural setting of triggers and thresholds for minimally genetically guided basic patterns.
The important thing for our purposes here is the emphasis DST places on the life cycle, developmental plasticity and environmental co-constitution. In following these thinkers, we can replace the controversial term "innate" with (the admittedly equally controversial) "reliably produced given certain environmental factors." In so doing, we have room to analyze differential patterns in societies that bring forth important differences from common endowments. In other words, we don't genetically inherit a subject, but we do inherit the potential to develop a subject when it is called forth by cultural practices. It is precisely the various types of subject called forth (the distribution of cognitive and affective patterns, thresholds, and triggers in a given population) that is to be analyzed in the study of the history of affect.
HISTORY OF AFFECT. We have seen how DST enables us to explore the bio-cultural dimension of bodies politic by thematizing extrasomatic inheritance as whatever is reliably reproduced in the next life cycle. Thus with humans we're into realm of bio-cultural evolution, with all its complexity and debates.5 We have to remember that the unit of selection here is not purely and simply genetic (indeed, for the most part genes are unaffected by cultural evolution, the classical instances of lactose tolerance and sickle-cell anemia notwithstanding), but should be seen as sets of cultural practices, thought in terms of their ability to produce affective cognitive structures (tendencies to react to categories of events) by tinkering with broadly genetically guided neuro-endocrine developmental processes.6
Regarding historically formed and culturally variable affective cognition, I work with Damasio's framework for the most part (Damasio 1995; 1999; 2003). Brain and body communicate neurologically and chemically in forming "somatic markers," which correlate or tag changes in the characteristic profile of body changes with the encounters, that is, changes in the characteristic profile of body-world interactions, which provoke them. Somatic markers are formed via a complex process involving brain-body-environment interaction, in which the brain receives signals from the body, from brain maps of body sectors, and from its own internal self-monitoring sectors. Thus the brain synthesizes how the world is changing (sensory input, which is only a modulation on ongoing processes), how the body is being affected by the world's changing (proprioception or "somatic mapping," again, a modulation of ongoing processes), and how the brain's endogenous dynamics are changing (modulation of ongoing internal neurological traffic or "meta-representations"). This synthesis sets up the capacity to experience a feeling of how the body would be affected were it to perform a certain action and hence be affected in turn by the world (off-line imaging, that is, modulation of the ongoing stream of "somatic markers"). I cannot detail the argument here, but a neurodynamical reading of Damasio's framework is broadly consonant with the Deleuzean emphasis on differential relations, that is, the linkage of rates of change of neural firing patterns, and on their integration at certain critical thresholds, resulting in "resonant cell assemblies" (Varela 1995) or their equivalent (Kelso 1995; Edelman and Tononi 2000). The key is that the history of bodily experience is what sets up a somatic marker profile; in other words, the affective cognition profile of bodies politic is embodied and historical.7
With this background, we see the limitations of much of the controversy around "cultural evolution" are due to the assumption that "information transfer" is the target for investigation (Runcimann 2005a: 13). But the notions of "meme" and "information transfer" founders on DST's critique – it's not a formed unit of information that we're after, but a process of guiding the production of dispositions to form somatic markers in particularly culturally informed ways. We have to think of ourselves as bio-cultural, with minimal genetically guided psychological modularity (reliably reproduced across cultures) and with a great deal of plasticity allowing for bio-cultural variance in forming our intuitions (Haidt 2001; Wexler 2006). In other words, we have to study political physiology, defined as the study of the production of the variance in affective cognitive triggers and thresholds in bodies politic, based on some minimally shared basic patterns.
All this means we can't assume an abstract affective cognitive subject but have to investigate the history of affect. But, the objection might go, don't we thereby risk leaving philosophy and entering historical anthropology? Answer: we only "leave" philosophy to enter history if we've surreptitiously defined philosophy ahead of time as ahistorical. Well, then, don't we leave philosophy and enter psychology? Answer: only if we've defined philosophy as concerned solely with universal structures of affective cognition. But that's the nub of the argument: the abstraction needed to reach the universally "human" (as opposed to the historically variant) is at heart anti-biological. Our biology makes humans essentially open to our cultural imprinting; our nature is to be so open to our nurture that it becomes second nature. But just saying that is typological thinking, concerned with "the" (universal) human realm; we need to bring concrete biological thought into philosophy. It's the variations in and across populations which are real; the type is an abstraction.
Having said all that, we must be clear that we are targeting variation in the subjectification practices producing variable triggers and thresholds of shared basic patterns. Now almost all of us reliably develop a set of basic emotions (rage, sadness, joy, fear, distaste) we share with a good number of reasonably complex mammals (Panksepp 1999). Many of us also have robust and reliable prosocial emotions (fairness, gratitude, punishment – shame and guilt are controversial cases) we share with primates, given certain basic and very wide-spread socializing inputs (De Waal 2005; Joyce 2006). Although some cultural practices can try to expand the reach of prosocial emotions to all humans or even all sentient creatures (with all sorts of stops in between), in many sets of cultural practices, these prosocial emotions are partial and local (Hume's starting point in talking about the ―moral sentiments‖). Why is the partiality of prosocial emotions a ―default setting‖ for sets of bio-cultural practices? One hypothesis is that war has been a selection pressure in bio-cultural evolution, operating at the level of group selection and producing very strong in-group versus out-group distinctions and very strong rewards / punishments for in-group conformity (e.g., Bowles and Gintis 2003).
There are difficult issues here concerning group selection and the unit of selection (Dawson 1999), but even if we can avoid the genetic level and focus on group selection for sets of social practices producing prosocial behaviors, we must still take into account a bitter controversy in anthropology about the alleged universality of warfare in human evolution and history (for a brief review of the literature from the anti-universalist position, see Sponsel 2000; for a book-length statement of the universalist position, see Otterbein 2004). There are three elements to consider here: the biological, the archaeological, and the ethnographic. (1) Regarding the biological, an important first step is to distinguish human war from chimpanzee male coalition and aggressive hierarchy, in short, the humans as "killer ape" hypothesis (Peterson and Wrangham 1997). Several researchers point out that we are just as genetically related to bonobos, who are behaviorally very different from chimpanzees (DeWaal 2006: 73; Fry 2007; see also Ferguson 2008). (2) Proponents of universal war often point to the archaeological record (Keeley 1997). Critics reply that claims of war damaged skulls are more plausibly accounted for by animal attacks (Fry 2007: 43). (3) Finally, we must couple the archaeological record with the current ethnographic record. But to do that we must distinguish simple hunter-gatherer (forager) bands from more complex hunter-gatherer tribes (with chiefs). The former have murder and revenge killing and / or group "executions" (sometimes by kin of the killer – weeding out the mad dogs), but not feuding or the "logic of social substitutability" which enables warfare (Kelly 2000; Fry 2007). We also have to look to current tribal warfare in the context of Western contact and territorial constriction and / or rivalry over trading rights (Sponsel 2000; Ferguson 1995).
The question would be how much war was needed to form an effective selection pressure for strong in-group identification and hence partiality of pro-social emotions? Richerson and Boyd argue that between group imitation can also be a factor in spreading cultural variants (2005: 209-10). Richerson and Boyd cite the example of early Christianity, where the selection pressure for subjectificaiton practices of "brotherhood" and hence care for the poor and sick was the high rate of epidemics in the Roman Empire. So war need not be the only selection pressure, nor does group destruction and assimilation of losers have to be the only means of transmitting cultural variants. We will assume in the following section that we haven't had time for selection pressures on genes with regard to warfare (Dawson 1999). But we have had time for selection pressures on bio-cultural subjectification practices relative to warfare, that is, for example, how to entrain a marching phalanx versus how to trigger berserker rage.
If war was a selection pressure on group subjectification practices for forming different bodies politic, we have to consider the history of warfare. With complex tribal warfare, you get loose groups of warriors with charismatic leaders (Clastres 1989). Virtually all the males of the tribe take part in this type of warfare; IOW, there is no professional warrior class / caste, except in certain rare cases. The argument of Fry 2007 is that the Chagnon / Clastres school, which focuses on the Yanomami as prototypical "primitive" warriors, picked complex horticultural hunter-gatherers and missed the even more basic simple foragers, who represented the vast majority of human history. But that's okay, because we're not talking about genes, but about bio-cultural evolution, about group selection of affective practices. So we don't have to claim warfare is in our genes; we need only investigate the geo-bio-affective group subjectification practices, once warfare is widespread. And I accept that this spread is post-agriculture, even for complex tribal "primitive" societies, who have always had States on their horizon (both immanently as that which is warded off, and externally, as that which is fought against; again, see Ferguson 1995 for a political history of Yanomami warfare).
This tribal egalitarianism changes with agriculture and class society. We need not enter DG's "anti-evolution" argument and the notion of the Urstaat, though we can note some fascinating new research which broadly supports their claim, derived from Jane Jacobs (1970), of the urban origins of agriculture (Balter 1998; but see the nuanced multiple-origins account in Pringle 1998). Consider thus the situation in Homer: we see vast differences between the affective structures of the warriors (bravery), the peasants (docility) who support them, the artisans who supply the arms (diligence), and the bards who sing their praises and who thus reinforce the affective structures of the warriors: the feeling that your name will live on if you perform bravely is vey important. Thus here the selection pressure is for sets of bio-cultural practices producing specialized affective structures relative to position in society, that is, relative to their contribution to the effectiveness of wars fought by that society. Once again, our concern is with the bio-cultural production of bodies politic, which tries to reliably produce bio-affective states. The triumph of hoplite warfare marks a shift in bio-cultural production. Compare Aristotle's golden mean of courage with what the Homeric warriors meant by courage. For Aristotle, courage means staying in the phalanx with your mates: charging ahead rashly is as much a fault as cowardly retreat (Nicomachean Ethics E 3.7.1115a30; b25-30; cf. Hanson 1989: 168). But for the Homeric heroes, charging ahead rashly is all there is.
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