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.In fact, one might even argue that desubjectivization itself allows feeling, which is always somewhat more than subjective, to enter the socius in a more active away.Ironically, modernity killed off the subject only to free up feeling and its critical potential.We may no longer be subjects, but our emotions still haunt the landscape, at once shaming and shaping its future.2Two distinctions, then.First, we need to examine the way in which the work offeeling has been absorbed and obscured by modernist psychoanalytic discourse.AsI hope to show, feeling is qualitatively different from desire; its physis, itsspontaneity, and its plentitude everywhere distinguish it from libido and free it from ego pathology.Feeling may qualify the experience of libidinal cathexis; its various modes seem either to increase or diminish the strictures of pathology.But feeling remains distinct both as an inassimilable quantum of physiognomic energyand as an extra-subjective revelation of value.Feeling, in other words, exceedsdesire on two fronts: it is both more spontaneous and more formal than desire, at once overflowing with affect and committed to value.Indeed, as I hope to show,feeling complicates not only our sense of desire, but psychoanalytic discourseitself.Its excesses continually complicate the experience of neurosis and thus drive psychoanalytic theory itself into a certain obsessional tailspin.Second, we must distinguish feeling from more recent accounts of affect.Undoubtedly, feeling isbound to a certain phenomenological affect, but it also consists of an evaluative dimension by which affect can be actualized, qualified, and evaluated.BrianMassumi, for example, draws upon cognitive science and classical phenomenologyin order to define parallel, but correlated systems of cognition.Every image-event, he claims, is received on two levels, the discursive and the affective.On the one hand, discourse fixes the quality of the image-event; it qualifies the event in terms of socially inscribed ideals or norms.On the other, affect is experienced in terms of strength and duration; it registers the force of the image-event, its sensual impact.For Massumi, the relationship between these two levels – of qualification andintensity – consists of resonation and interference, amplification and dampening.Cognition occurs on a sliding scale between these extremes: at one end, weexperience pure discourse, rational analysis; at the other, pure autonomous affect,212T.E.Hulme and the Question of Modernismphenomenological openness; in between, we find a conscious-autonomic mix, ameasure of their participation in one another.Indeed, in between, we find emotion, emotion as ‘qualified intensity, the conventional, consensual point of insertion of intensity into semantically and semiotically formed progressions, intonarrativizable action-reaction circuits, into function and meaning’ (Massumi, 1995, pp.86-8).Massumi’s typology is adequate, but his emphasis is not.As apostmodernist, as a Deleuzian, Massumi pins his hopes on affect.Affect isintensity, and intensity is inassimilable.Affect is the virtual, an infinite potential, waiting to be actualized – it is the foundation of an ethical openness to the world.For moderns, though, affect is only the base of experience, an unconsciouspotential in need of some structure or formal judgment.Hence, they tend tovalidate emotion – the midpoint of discourse and affect – as the socio-linguistic fixing, or qualification, of an experience.Following the moderns’ lead, I wouldlike to assert the autonomy of emotion as a mode that productively conjoins affect with judgment.Hulme’s feelings move us away from psychology towardsphenomenology, but also beyond a simple phenomenology toward ethics.Throughfeeling, being is reopened to a meaningful network, affectively linked to the construction and reconstruction of social value.3To begin, then, we should recognize that Hulme’s most intense emotions ariseprecisely in response to a confusion about the role of emotion in thought.If anger seems to strike a dominant note in his work, its first cause – somewhattautologically – seems to be his inability to distinguish anger from true thought.Indeed, Hulme tends to write through rage – rage against romantics, againstliberals, against pacifists, against women.And, honestly, he is most captivating when hateful, most thrilling in his violence, whether it is directed at BertrandRussell’s rationalist ethics or the threat of German expansionism ( CW, pp.153, 330ff.).One must marvel at a man who claims he is about to perform a ‘war dance’on philosophical determinism or who plans to direct ‘a little personal violence’against a rival art critic ( CW, pp.146, 260).On one level, Hulme’s conflation of thought and feeling is self-serving.He wants to play it both ways; when reason fails, he turns to violence, and when violence is impossible or uncouth, he turns to reason; similarly, he can easily accuse his enemies of being either too rational or too irrational, failing to see the truth of his reason or his passion.Always, for Hulme, anger remains compelling as it comes closest to the oppositional stance of true critique.Anger serves to reinforce an otherwise anxious boundary betweenintellect and world, shoring up an impossible distinction between the cultural critic and his culture.Indeed, even at his most cantankerous, he finds room to confessthat extremism alone makes his thought appear tangible and concrete; he remarksthat the most powerful thinker is one who can tangibly mark himself off fromothers, that all intellectual work must start with a set of people who are prepared to fight for their position ( CW, pp.131, 60).At base, though, Hulme is deeply troubled by this epistemological muddle.If anything, his loud wrath serves topurify his responses, to drown out the realization that his most rigorous ideas are simply ideological, or that what he thinks is ideology in others has a respectable intellectual basis ( CW, p.145).His greatest frustration arises in response to theHulme’s Feelings 213recognition that, among moderns, any kind of debate has become impossible.Itcorresponds to his recognition that the hybridity of thought both reinforces anddenies the possibility of conclusiveness, at once erects and erases its own rhetoric
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