Ruth Leys

The Turn to Affect: A Critique

In this essay I plan to discuss the general turn to affect, particularly the turn to the neurosciences of emotion, that has recently taken place in the humanities and social sciences.2 The rise of interest in the emotions among historians has been well documented.3 My concern is somewhat different. I want to consider the turn to the emotions that has been occurring in a broad range of fields, including history, political theory, human geography, urban and environmental studies, architecture, literary studies, art history and criticism, media theory, and cultural studies. The work of Daniel Lord Smail, who has recently inaugurated neurohistory by arguing for the integration of history and the brain sciences, including the sciences of emotion, is a case in point.4 But my inquiry will also consider the claims of those cultural critics and others who, even before historians ventured into this terrain, in such newly designated fields as neuropolitics, neuro-

Meyer, Watson, and the dangers of behaviorism

Between 1908 and 1920 Adolf Meyer and John Watson were colleagues and quasicollaborators at Johns Hopkins University. This article investigates the relationship between the two men by focusing on three crucial episodes in the history of their association, culminating in the incident that forced Watsons departure from academic life. Throughout the article emphasis is placed on the significant differences, amounting at last to open conflict, between Meyers functional approach in psychiatry and Watsons behaviorist doctrines.

Surveying the Emotions

A commentary on Robert Kagan’s What is Emotion? (2007). The commentary praises the author for the range and breadth of his analysis and for his skepticism concerning the common tendency to equate emotions with brain states. At the same time, I raise questions about the terms in which Kagan attempts to separate out the distinct components of the emotional “cascade.” In particular, I suggest that by treating the appraisal or interpretation of the changes in bodily feelings as a distinct phase of the emotional response, Kagan appears to dissociate the relevant brain and bodily feeling states from the contexts or meanings in which they are embedded, and to do so in ways that obscure the relationship between the successive components or phases he has identified.