Feeling F.I.N.E.

:
Social psychology, suggestion and the problem of social influence
Lisa Blackman

ritical Psychology emerged through a constructionist paradigm that re-located intra-psychic processes within the frameworks of language and discourse. This turn to language has been described by critical social psychologists as a more sociological model of subjectivity, which privileges the role of social and cultural processes in the formation of selfhood (Gough and McFadden, 2001). The discursive body that underpins this paradigm has increasingly been subject to critique across the humanities and psychological sciences, particularly for its sidelining of the role of affect, feeling, emotion and desire in our being and becoming. This article will consider the nature of this critique, and how current debates across social and cultural theory might help psychologists reformulate feeling and affect as important areas of study. It will also consider the phenomenon of emotional contagion that has been welldocumented in social and personality psychology in light of these debates. Keywords: Affect, suggestion, enactment, social psychology, affective transmission, social influence

Introduction: Feeling F.I.N.E. I was introduced to the significance of the acronym feeling F.I.N.E. (f***ed up, insecure, neurotic and emotional) at a conference organfeeling F.I.N.E 23

ised by the Hearing Voices Network (c.f., Blackman, 2001, 2007). In this setting which brought together service users, academics and professionals, the acronym F.I.N.E. was mobilised in an ironic fashion to refer to those feelings, affects, beliefs and practices which the service user does not feel safe in expressing. Thus, rather than say I feel depressed, anxious, sad, angry or paranoid to a professional (usually a psychiatrist), the service user covers this over by a retort that they are feeling fine. Of course this response to the question, how are you? is recognised as largely a platitude, but what the acronym F.I.N.E. discloses is what has to be firmly placed in the background, covered over and silenced in the forms of emotional labour and self-management required in advanced liberal cultures (Hochschild, 1993; Blackman, 2004, 2006). The acronym F.I.N.E. provides a trope for organising the following article that will focus upon what became refused, repudiated and rejected from social psychology in its move to privilege a particular version of social influence to theorise subjectivity. I use the term version following the French philosopher Vinciane Despret (2004) who has explored how psychology has invented and produced multiple forms of knowledge that co-exist in a complex relational matrix. Rather than view the past as a collection of extant knowledges that have been superseded in the evolution of the discipline, Despret shows how connections between knowledges or versions can be mapped according to whether they continue, disqualify, negate, emulate or activate previous versions, or even invent new versions and therefore relations to ourselves. She emphasises the importance of paying attention to how versions multiply rather than close down questions or problems, bringing into existence distinct objects and entities. This focus upon the complexity of knowledge practices has affinities with Actor Network Theory (Latour, 2005) which focuses upon how objects and entities are assembled and made up exploring the connections and articulations which make particular versions possible. What is important are the relational connections and practices which stabilise particular versions and the kinds of problems, questions and entities they engender. In this article I will focus upon a particular version of suggestibility which was translated within early social psychology such that it became possible to ask only certain kinds of questions about the relationship between manifest forms of contagious communication and
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subjectivity. The background version that early social psychologists, such as William McDougall (1910) and Edward Ross (1909) engaged with, was one which identified the spread of particular feelings, emotions, affects, beliefs and practices throughout populations as due to an inter-psychological capacity known as ordinary suggestion (Sidis, 1898; Tarde, 1903). The psychologist Boris Sidis (1898) in a book, The Psychology of Suggestion, argued that ordinary suggestion was what underlay subjects capacity to be affected and affect others and that this process registered in a realm of feeling rather than conscious deliberation or will. Sidis alongside his contemporaries such as William James, Henry Bergson and Gabriel Tarde were all fascinated by practices of hypnosis, spiritualism and particular processes of psychopathology, such as Multiple Personality Disorder (Hacking, 1995). These experiences were taken as proof that what defined the subject was not rational self-containment, but more porous and permeable connections with others. This relationality was thought through ideas of multiplicity, dissociation and suggestibility (Littlewood, 1996; Blackman, 2007b, 2008b). Communication was primarily viewed as contagious and was felt rather than processed through a logic of rationality. Given that this version of suggestibility was endlessly repeated as an explanation of social forces by philosophers and scientists, I want to consider some of the conditions which led to its substitution by a very different kind of suggestibility within early social psychology, such that what was increasingly seen to define the so-called normal human subject was the capacity of will (Smith, 1992). We will explore how the parameters of this translation are being reactivated by the contemporary focus across the humanities and psychological sciences with affect, and the specific ways in which affect and feeling are produced as objects across different knowledge practices.

How can we be one yet many?

To the puzzle of the multiverse, is now added the puzzle of the folded body: how can you contain so much diversity, so many cells, so many microbes, so many organs, all folded in such a way that the many act as one as Whitehead said? (Latour, 2004, p. 227). How can the person be one yet many? (Lewis, 2002, p. 150)

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The question is not What is a human being? or What is life?. The question is What to do? (Mol, 1998, p. 163).

The above quotes are taken from the founder of Actor Network Theory, Bruno Latour (2005), a personality psychologist informed by dialogic psychology, and an anthropologist interested in the question of enactment1 (Mol, 2002). Although the questions are framed slightly differently, they all point towards the concept of multiplicity rather than singularity being the defining characteristic of contemporary forms of subjectivity. What is seen to govern our being and becoming is multiplicity, although it is recognised that this is inevitably lived through a sense of singularity. Thus the paradox raised is precisely, as Lewis (2002) argues how the person can be one yet many? This question of how the subject hangs together is one that underlies some of the renewed interest in affect, feeling and sensation across the humanities, and which has begun to raise doubt about the continuing usefulness of discursive approaches for theorising subjectification. As we will see, the affective turn does not provide any unification for the many different ways in which affect and feeling are produced as objects across the humanities. I will not therefore provide definitions of affect and feeling from the outset as this assumes that we can somehow know the objects of which we speak. Rather, I wish to return to a specific version of suggestion that allowed particular questions to be asked about human subjectivity such that the experience of automaticity, bodily feeling and rapidity of thought were distributed in a particular kind of way. This version was largely rejected, repudiated and refused within early Anglo-American social psychology (McDougall, 1910; Ross, 1909) in attempts to understand how ideas, beliefs, affects, feelings and traditions would spread throughout populations such that they would achieve a social unity or uniformity. Although the version of suggestion as ordinary suggestion was largely rejected and placed in the background, it remains as a ghostly and haunting presence within contemporary social psychology. I will argue that the very exclusion of this object has carried through a number of problems and paradoxes for the psychological sciences that can be mapped in the contemporary valorisation of affect and feeling within cognitive science, for example (c.f., Forgas, 2000). This article will consider
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the significance of early social psychologys engagement with the problem of social influence in light of the renewed interest in reinventing suggestion across the humanities (Chertok and Stengers, 1992; Orr, 2006). The reinvention of suggestion has been recognised as an important site for posing new questions about the limits and modalities of scientific rationalities. These limits are precisely those that have stabilised particular questions and excluded certain others in attempts to understand precisely how we might be affected and affect others through a register of feeling. The importance, as Chertok and Stengers (1992) argue, is to examine precisely how different practices frame and invent ways of enacting affectivity, and precisely what has to be eliminated in order for an object, such as social influence to be made true.

Social psychology and the problem of social influence The object of inquiry of contemporary social psychology is largely accepted and framed as the problem of social influence. The invention of the object social influence within early social psychology, brought into being the very idea of two separate, yet interlocking domains of influence. These domains of influence might be conceived as the individual and the social or nature and culture, for example. In a contemporary social psychology text, Applying Social Psychology (Kremor et al., 2003), the idea of social influence is accepted as both the object of inquiry and the means to frame pragmatic solutions to issues. These issues are thought through a tension which is set up between two separate domains of influence; nature and nurture (ibid: 109). The problem of nature/nurture is reified as the central dilemma that is taken to organise and understand the individual in his or her social world (ibid, p. 8). Key areas and issues, or what I will designate following Foucault (1972), surfaces of emergence, are cited as producing contemporary places where this dilemma is made manifest. These include the environment, work, health and illness, peace and conflict and communication and the media. The problem of the media is thus framed as a problem of the potentially pernicious influence of the media on public perceptions of risk, or as the powerful negative influence on child audiences (ibid, p. 109). Although this framing is one which has been subject to contestation within media studies and critical psychology (c.f. Blackman and Walkerdine 2001), it feeling F.I.N.E 27

nevertheless is a particular version which brings into existence an idea of social influence that has a long, complex history of association, combination and verification. Social psychology and its varied conditions of existence is a particularly fruitful place to explore the genealogy of the forms of knowledge which have helped to shape this contemporary domain of problematisation (Rose 1996, Osbourne 1992). Gough and McFadden (2001, p. 100) show how increasingly throughout the twentieth century social influence processes have become reduced within experimental social psychology to some action of the presence of others. These have included the idea of social facilitation, conceived as whether the presence of others enhances or inhibits individual performance (ibid, p. 96), to the investigation of social distortions (Asch 1952). One famous study of social influence processes conceived in this way are the studies of conformity conducted by Stanley Milgram (1974). Stanley Milgrams (1974) experimental study of social conformity was designed to explore the extent to which personality variation might underpin a persons obedience to authority. In the context of what Arendt (1965) had described as the banality of evil, in the wake of attempts to explain and justify the horrors of the holocaust, Milgram (ibid, p. 5) was concerned with how far ordinary individuals will go in complying with the experimenters instructions. Obedience was aligned to a psychological mechanism that might link individual action with what were viewed as powerful forms of social influence (ibid, p. 115). This notion of obedience as a psychological mechanism, which could be observed, measured and compared, built on earlier formulations of obedience as a particular set of psychological attitudes or traits (Adorno, 1950). This was set within a concern with what might influence a persons conformity to an authoritative or charismatic other. What was seen to be a pervasive fact of cultural uniformity (Jones and Gerard 1967, p. 331), linked to concerns structuring the tradition of French sociology at the turn of the twentieth century (Le Bon, 1896; Tarde, 1903), were arrested, compiled, compared and translated within the parameters of a newly emerging social psychology laboratory. Jones and Gerard (ibid) in a book titled Foundations of Social Psychology, argued that social psychology was able to anchor these broader socio-political concerns within an experimental setting.
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This enabled scientists to manipulate variables constructed on the basis of what was an already agreed consensus amongst the community as to what might account for conformity and social influence. These included intrapsychic and intergroup processes which were linked to personality traits, and differences in cognitive appraisal due to attraction, intensity of emotional feeling, and a number of concepts such as group membership, peer group persuasion and so forth. The book provides an interesting insight into some of the surfaces of emergence where aspects of thought, behaviour and conduct were being scrutinised and problematised. These diverse sites included the military, the media, civil rights protests and debates, prison camps, cults, bargaining relationships and the group. These sites and the general assumptions and divisions which governed how behaviour was being problematised, provided some of the key distinctions through which the idea of social influence was to be increasingly specified and understood. These sites, for Jones and Gerard (ibid, p. 5) provided illustrative cases of social psychological processes which formed around the problem of social deprivation in the case of the Wild Boy of Aveyron (see Rose, 1985); the problem of morale within army training groups; the problem of media influence and media panic in relation to Orson Welles radio dramatisation of H.G. Wellss War of the Worlds in 1938 (see Bourke 2005; Orr, 2006); the problem of racial segregation within the southern states of the USA in the 1950s; the problem of thought reform within North Korean prison camps during the Korean war; the problem of cults (brainwashing) in relation to the proselytising activity of Mrs Keech; the problem of competitive motivation in local, national and transnational bargaining relationships; and the problem of initiation within group membership and exclusion. The idea of simulation was central to the kinds of object-making engendered by the social psychological laboratory, which translated a complex set of processes into a range of factors and variables which could be compared, compiled, documented, measured, inscribed and transported across different theoretical persuasions and debates. The aforementioned sites were linked into a complex assemblage which created the very object, social influence, which could be further differentiated and specified according to a range of factors which could be manipulated by the scientist. Jones and Gerard (ibid, p. 4) refer to these processes of

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simulation as a form of experimental stagecraft, linking invention and creativity optimism, ingenuity and dash (ibid, p. 4) with the very possibility of positivist science. Thus a particular version of social influence was inscribed into the practices of positivist science, such that the laboratory was viewed as the site for examining a particular cluster or configuration of what were designated as intra and inter-psychological processes. These processes were primarily taken to be readable and comprehensible through the action of cognition and its various distortions.

Social psychology and a suggestive realm In a fascinating genealogy of panic disorder, Jackie Orr (2006) cogently illustrates how social psychology, despite its engendering of social influence as its object of inquiry, has also worked with an assumption that a suggestive realm is central to how populations are governed and managed. This tension between the primacy of will and the possibility of suggestion was held together within the knowledge practices of social psychology by displacing suggestion onto particular kinds of body. These bodies were inscribed and viewed increasingly through the lens of mass psychology that redistributed suggestion in relation to a particular concept of the mob or group mind (McDougall, 1920). As we will see, social psychology took the idea of suggestion as its object of study and re-figured and translated it through concepts derived from evolutionary biology. Although the concept of contagious communication was recognised as a modality that would bond people together, ordinary suggestion was increasingly redistributed as a more primitive mode of communication to be found in those who were considered lower, inferior and closer to the animal. One of the most popularised proponents of this re-formulation of suggestion can be found in the writings of the crowd theorist, Gustave Le Bon (1922). Gustave Le Bon, a French Royalist, became a central figure in the inauguration of a mass psychology, which was concerned with how it is that an individual can, under certain conditions, come under the influence of a crowd and commit acts he is normally not capable of committing (Jones and Gerard, 1967, p. 331). Le Bon, like many of his contemporaries was interested in hypnotic trance and was impressed by the writings and practices of the nineteenth
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century French neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot. Freud had gone to study with Charcot in 1885 at the famous La Salpetriere hospital in France in order to refine his own practice and study of the alterations in thought, feeling and behaviour made possible by practices of hypnosis. He later diverged from Charcot in his own interpretation of hysteria as a psychological rather than neurological condition (c.f. Chertok and Stengers, 1992; Ellenburger, 1970). Le Bon (1922) mobilised the understanding that hypnotic trance was a particular induced somatic mode of awareness (Csordas, 2002) and used this to understand crowd psychology. He was particularly concerned with how to understand the revolts and uprisings of the Paris Communes and understood suggestion as the mode of communication that forged powerful social bonds. He framed this through the action of instincts that were allowed free reign in crowd situations where people were seen to lose their rationality and become more amenable to modes of suggestion. Le Bon therefore refigured suggestion as an abnormal phenomenon that was aligned with an instinctual economy. This connected up a notion of inherited biological predispositions with behaviour, thought and feeling that were considered automatic and involuntary (Foucault, 2003). This voluntary/involuntary axis was mapped onto a distinction between the primitive and civilised central to evolutionary theories of degeneracy prominent at the turn of the 20th century (Darwin, 1859). The person swayed by the crowd was to become a prototypical being seen to embody the attributes which connected the human with the animal. This concatenation between the mysterious workings of the unconscious and the identification of the primitive within the civilised acted as a potent unifying strategy. The working classes, colonial subjects, women and children became the bearers of this fear of the primitive and its potential irruption into the smooth running of the social order. Contact between persons, groups, leaders and demagogues was fraught with the potential for certain people to be reduced to a primitive state and (to be) swayed not by logic but by emotionally charged words (Jones and Gerard 1967, p. 331). As Orr suggests, the apparent psychopathology of crowd behaviour that Le Bon mobilised in his writings aligned the crowd with an array of pathologized others neurotic, feminine, primitive, and racialized others, the mass of working classes and

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the poor (2006, p. 42). The concepts that Le Bon popularised in his book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1922) which was translated into many languages, became one of the stated bases of the emergence of social psychology. It was also one of the conditions of possibility for Freuds (1921) work on the psychopathology of groups, as well as the emerging discipline of media studies (Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001). We can certainly still see the resonance of these concepts in more recent accounts of the problem of media violence (Barker and Petley 1997; Gauntlett and Hill, 1999) and the death of Diana, for example (Blackman 1999; Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001). The view of the psychological subject that was to take root within the psychological sciences was one where the normal subject was seen to exercise certain psychological capacities, such as will and inhibition, fortifying them against social influence processes (Smith, 1992). Smith suggests that inhibition as a concept connected up a number of contrasts between the higher and the lower, reason and emotion, mind and body and the elite and the masses, which were coordinated in relation to an individualistic sense of self (p. 5). Inhibition was viewed as a form of psychological control that would enable the domination of the instincts and the action of the mind over the body. As Smith (ibid) argues:
The act of inhibition is dynamic and implies conflict, perhaps between powers within the individual, perhaps between the individual and outside forces. The relation may refer simply to one force controlling another, or it may imply the suppression of some spontaneous or natural energy. The language often suggests that control, expressed as inhibition, whether internalized or coming from without, is a fundamental condition of social life (p. 5).

In relation to understandings of panic that governed social psychological inquiry during WWII and the subsequent Cold War in the USA, Orr argues that the concepts of suggestion and emotional contagion were replaced by an emphasis on the normative, reasonable, even adaptive features of crowd behavior (ibid, p. 128). Quoting the social psychologists, Lindesmith and Strauss (1956, p. 456), she argues that, much of what is called suggestibility actually involves judgment and reasoning and may represent a quite real32

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istic adaptation (ibid, p. 129). This shift between suggestion, as a form of contagious communication, and sympathy, understood as a form of conscious judgment and deliberation became the two distinct versions of social influence that social psychology enacted in different ways. In an interesting commentary on how these versions were coordinated, Orr (ibid) draws attention to the role that social psychology increasingly played in communications research that aimed to explain collective behaviour, as well as providing techniques and strategies to the military, industry and the mass-media to induce suggestive commitment amongst the masses to certain beliefs, ideas and practices. Although will had become the psychological capacity that defined the normative human subject (Smith, 1992), what remained was an understanding that feeling, affect and emotion were important in communication processes, and that the so-called masses must be moved beyond a logic of reason and rationality in order to induce subjective commitment. Social psychology increasingly played a role in USA panic prevention and production (in relation to the fears generated by the Cold War) and enacted suggestion in this context as a mode of communication that could be manipulated in order to regulate and manage psychic life. This included the understanding, for example, that radio was a technique that could induce mass-mediated suggestion or what was also understood as contagion without contact (Orr, 2006, p. 48). This mobilisation of suggestion as a form of contagious communication that could create psychic realities, represented, for Orr, the curious theoretical vertigo in which social suggestion becomes reasonable just as reason starts to experiment with its oh-so-suggestive symbolic powers (ibid, p. 132). The relationships between suggestion and sympathy were articulated through a number of contrasts and dualisms that produced suggestion as an object aligned with the body, emotion and primitiveness, whilst sympathy was aligned with the mind, reason and civilised thought, feeling and conduct.

Mass psychology The only language they understand is one which by-passes reason, speaks directly to the heart and makes reality seem either better or worse than it in fact is (Moscovici, 1985, p. 31). With the separation feeling F.I.N.E 33

of suggestion from sympathy different sub-disciplines of psychology could further add to their differentiation and specification. Thus, mass psychology connected up the body, emotion and primitiveness, through producing the feeling body as its object. Feeling was viewed as an integral part of the way in which imitative processes were seen to reproduce themselves between actors within a field of complex social processes. Mass psychology therefore took the study of imitative behaviour (Moscovici, 1985, p. 1) as its object and proclaimed itself as a new branch of the psychological sciences that could tackle this phenomenon. Mass psychology also became a study of mass communications and was concerned primarily with the repercussions of group entities for communication processes. Mass communications were produced as a particular kind of social influence that would alter individual minds thus providing the fertile soil for forms of crowd psychology. The idea was that the masses would need to be swayed, rather than appealed to through reason and rationality, didactic command and instruction, and staged forms of persuasion. These modes of communication would miss the mark, and even make followers more resistant to change and transformation. What were needed were appeals to the heart, to feeling, to passion, to the imagination; to a realm of affect which was co-present with the psychic and emotional rather than the intellect and reasoning. As Moscovici (1985, p. 104) proclaims, the age of the crowd was the age of the imagination, and he who rules there rules by imagination. Moscovici (ibid, p. 139) characterises these appeals as creating an illusion of love through the use of a range of techniques; affective, bodily, and psychological, designed to maximise and facilitate processes of suggestion and imitation. These might include the use of symbols, flags, images, singing, music, affirmations, phrases, speeches and slogans. These would be delivered through the hypnotising use of repetition, rather than didactic command and instruction. Individuals would be touched in ways which might be non-conscious or create the feeling that they are the originator of the feeling, rather than simply mechanically reproducing the beliefs of a charismatic other. There would be a resonance or attunement between actors within a social field or between leaders and followers. This was based upon a non-logocentric way of thinking about relationality or connection which depended upon the idea
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that individuals were open to being affected. The capacity to be affected was linked to the imagination that was constituted through the concept of impression or mental touch. Social influence was not about brute power or force, but conceived more as a lightness of touch, where everything is at once inside and outside everything else (Connor, 2004, p. 281). Connor (2004, p. 100) links the notion of impression to the idea of the skin as having active powers to register and express feelings and states between people. This is what he terms, the translation of otherwise inchoate states and feelings into epidermal terms, which he links to theories of maternal impressions in the nineteenth century. These theories were based on the idea that there was an intimate and symbiotic relationship between the mother and her foetus, such that the boundaries between self and (m)other were porous and permeable. This folding and infolding between mother and foetus was achieved through a kind of sympathetic impression (ibid, p. 118), where both could touch and be touched through processes of psychic imprinting (ibid, p. 103). A feminised space of relationality provided a way of thinking about social influence, which did not instate the figure of the clearly bounded individual exerting their will and exercising rationality, as the means to set them apart from others. The metaphor of psychic or mental touch was one which depended on the idea that the skin is not simply a boundary or interface the skin begins to wake and wonder, an actively unfolding and self-forming organism rather than merely passive stuff (ibid, p. 118). Moscovici (1985) however laments the fact that mass psychology was largely ignored or discredited by other sub-disciplines of the psychological sciences. Moscovici (ibid) suggests, as Orr corroborates (2006), that the study of contagious communications became the object of media and advertising and propaganda specialists (p. 68). Teresa Brennan (2004) argues that what became normalised within the psychological sciences was the idea of affective selfcontainment, rather than the idea of affective transmission. The normal psychological subject was one who could fortify themselves against social influence processes, foregrounding the importance within social psychology of separation and singularity, over connection and relationality. McDougall and Ross both framed the social psychological project as an investigation of individuality and how

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this might be promoted such that subjects could become a voice and not an echo, a person and not a parrot (Ross, 1909, p. 4). Suggestion was increasingly translated into a kind of physiological automatism, located in those who were considered lower, inferior and closer to the so-called animal and primitive. Although affective transmission was considered part and parcel of crowd psychology, and therefore a concern for governance and regulation, the normative psychological subject was increasingly seen to be coherent, bounded and autonomous, able to withstand social influence. Suggestion was to be re-distributed within a contrast between the primitive and the civilised, where sympathetic identification was to become a conscious, rational, cognitive process. These processes would ideally over-ride the action of the instincts, emotion and desire through the acquisition and sedimentation of habits through training and discipline (c.f., Blackman 2007b, 2008b). Smith (ibid) cogently shows how inhibition as a concept also connected and coordinated a variety of sites that consolidated the contrasts of higher and lower, mind and body, primitive and civilised and reason and emotion. These included Victorian selfimprovement (Smiles, 1864), law, work and reproductive capital, education, and importantly, mesmerism, hypnotism and trance. These practices were reformulated as those that would potentially remove the will rather than point towards the capacity of the subject to affect and be affected. Thus, as Chertok and Stengers (1992) argue: Like hypnosis, suggestion has taken on a predominantly pejorative meaning denoting an illegitimate influence, that is, an influence the acceptance of which cannot be rationally justified by the one who accepts it Suggestion is impure, it is the uncontrollable par excellence (p. xvi). Ruth Leys (2000) has argued that what was radical about suggestion within early hypnotic techniques of suggestibility was its potential to displace the boundary between the self and other, inside and outside, conscious and non-conscious and psychic and material. As a model of affective transmission it worked with an understanding of connection and relationality that did not separate the mind from the body, the individual from the social and reason from emotion. Christian Borch has argued that what is interesting about the way that suggestion took form within early sociology was its relationship to a complex interplay or in-between of rationality that dissolved boundaries between self and other
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(2006, p. 3). Although suggestion has become a very different kind of object within sociological and psychological theorising, largely understood as a primitive form of contagion (Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001), or a physiological automatism (Blackman, 2007b, 2008b), this does not mean that the problem of suggestion is over. Indeed I would argue that the current focus on affect and feeling across the humanities and psychological sciences, points towards the importance of reinventing suggestion through models which do not presume singularity and separation from the outset. What we will see in the next section is how the limits of singularity and affective self-containment have been demonstrated in a vast empirical literature on emotional contagion that presents a perplexing challenge to the psychological sciences.

Emotional contagion Although, the idea of affective self-containment has become normalised across the psychological sciences, I want to turn to contemporary work in social and personality psychology that remains as an excess to this model. The phenomenon of emotional contagion refers to the ways in which feelings can be passed between people such that their moods can shift and change. This phenomenon is recognised within the clinical literature exploring therapists experiences of working with their clients (Hatfield et al., 1994). Hatfield and Rapson worked together as therapists and comment on, how easy it is to catch the rhythms of our clients feelings from moment to moment and, in consequence, how profoundly our moods can shift from hour to hour (ibid, p. 1). They describe this experience as a kind of being in tune (p. 16) that creates a synchrony of feeling with those around you. This phenomenon suggests that people can be linked and connected physiologically and emotionally and can communicate this through the exchange of feeling that they are not necessarily consciously aware of. They chart the long history of this realm of affective exchange in clinical research, literature, the psychological and behavioural sciences, and in events that have occurred within populations throughout history that involve the passing of mood, emotion and passion. One such example that they recount is cross cultural evidence that documents various epidemics of laughter, depression, mania and seizures that have occurred in Singapore, Malaysia and Africa, for example. feeling F.I.N.E 37

Although such contagions have been documented throughout history there is plenty of evidence to suggest that affective transmission is a phenomenon that is part and parcel of everyday encounters. It is usual to focus in the literature on exceptional phenomenon such as the mass waves of panic that followed Orson Welless legendary radio broadcast of War of the Worlds in the 1940s in America (Cantril, 1940; Bourke, 2005; Orr, 2006). Many listeners actually believed that this was an unfolding reportage of the invasion of America by alien visitors that caused mass hysteria. However, a recent study documents the centrality of affective transmission in intimate relationships. This study carried out by Nick Powdthavee at the University of Warwick was presented at the Royal Economic Societys Annual Conference in Nottingham (March 21-23, 2005). The study purported to answer the central question: Could your spouses happiness determine your own happiness? The articles did not challenge the idea that happiness might be contagious and inhere between individuals; rather the sensational aspects of the stories revolved around the findings which suggested that the only couples to benefit from such good feeling were married couples. What were clearly documented were the contagious aspects of happiness and how in the married couples this buffeted them against the stresses and strains of losing a job, coping with illness and whether they owned their own property. Although this study pushes the economics of happiness closer to the psychological sciences, the psychological literature does not contain a unified or coherent explanation of emotional contagion. Indeed, what marks the literature is the puzzling challenge that the literature makes to the idea of the individual being self-enclosed, clearly bounded and separate from others. The phenomenon of emotional contagion however has travelled widely, forming the basis of discussions of the importance of affect management in the workplace (Barsade and Gibson, 2007). It is also presented in different ways as an important component of effective and successful communication where individuals are introduced to the need for more intensive micromanagement of interactions in the workplace, community, amongst friends, lovers and partners in order to restore some notion of intentionality and conscious will to the proceedings. The importance of micro-managing the environment or potential viral culture in which one moves is supported by
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the burgeoning literature on emotional intelligence (Goleman, 1996). This concept assumes that one can learn certain psychological competences that will allow the successful conscious monitoring, understanding and altering of emotion, feeling and affect in order to achieve certain desired ends. Although on the one hand emotional contagion threatens the notion of voluntarism associated with the fiction of autonomous selfhood (Rose, 1996), one of the key responses across different settings has been to reinstate the importance of developing the psychological resources that would allow one to cope with the implications of the transmission of affect. Emotional contagion has therefore become an important site for creating and orchestrating certain psychic realities that might be beneficial for personal well-being and work-place performance, for example. It has also formed the basis of new practices of marketing and advertising, such as neuromarketing and emotional branding, which are seeking to manipulate and exploit the implications of affective transmission understood through particular neuroscientific concepts such as mirror neurons, for example (Gallese, 2006). Hatfield et al. (1994) liken emotional contagion to a form of magic that is little understood (within prevailing models), but has huge implications for public policy, and for the practicing knowledges of Drs, lawyers and therapists. As they recount: We may believe we guide ourselves through our daily treks, but a moments reflection shows we neither proceed alone nor have as much control as we might have thought over others or our interactions with them (p. 190). The puzzling challenge of emotional contagion to work on the affective body within social theory has been picked up by feminist cultural theorists, such as Teresa Brennan (2004), in her book, The Transmission of Affect. I would like to draw out some of the key concepts that she deploys in order to consider the kinds of new entities, objects, problems and questions that are made possible by refiguring the subject as connected and not separate from others. She suggests that the huge field of documented instances of the transmission of affect are important, as they break down the distinction between the individual and the social and the natural and the cultural. She argues that, the transmission of affects means, that we are not self-contained in terms of our energies (p. 6). She turns the question of affective self-containment on its head. Rather

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than presume we are self-contained and separate from others, she directs the question to historical material that would suggest that there have been, different, more permeable, ways of being (p. 10). She looks rather at how we maintain an image of self-containment in the relationships that we develop with ourselves and others. One process that is part of the formation of a separate, singular body is one that relies on othering. The concept of othering is usually used to refer to the ways in which within imperial and colonial settings, the bodies of certain groups, such as women, colonial subjects, people with different sexualities and the working classes are made to signify as inferior and degenerate in relation to a white, male, middle-class norm (c.f. Blackman and Walkerdine, 2001). Their bodies become othered and viewed as the site of animality, primitivism and irrationality. She argues that these othering processes occur on a mundane level between individuals. Rather than recognise the permeability of boundaries and the transmission of affect we deny that affects are coming from the other, or deny that they are coming from us. In other words, we draw limits and boundaries around what we are willing to recognise, which often means that certain people are made to carry the affects of another. This failure to recognise means that we deny the emotional and affective connections that sustain our sense of subjectivity. There is a language for this denial of affective exchange that Brennan locates within Freudian psychoanalysis. Thus, the assumption that othering relies upon projection was central to Freuds theories of the unconscious. This can create particular relational connections between people where as Brennan argues: The person projecting the judgement is freed from its depressing effects on him or herself. However, he or she is dependent on the other carrying that projected affect, just as the master depends on the slave a kind of hook on which the others negative affect can fix (p. 111). However, the affective language that people tend towards is one that emphasises separation, and tends to cover over or occlude the rather different kind of language that psychoanalysis, for example, makes possible. This has been explored by critical psychologists such as Paul Stenner (1993), who has explored how projection becomes a discursive or linguistic strategy, hidden in the kinds of narratives and practices that people tend to deploy to understand
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the basis of jealousy. Thus, he tells us that commonsense practice assumes that jealousy is a property of the self-contained individual; there are jealous types who cannot control their feelings in relation to another. Stenner troubles this view of jealousy as a property of an isolated mind, and instead approaches it as a subject position. The concept of a subject position is one that has evolved from discursive work within critical psychology that assumes that intra-psychic processes can be relocated within our linguistic and accounting practices. Thus the notion of a jealous type can be used to position somebody as unaware and unenlightened, or as being emotionally weak or insecure. Both of these strategic uses of a jealousy narrative or story have particular implications for the person positioning and being positioned. Thus, in the example that Stenner develops of a couple, Jim and May, Jim positions himself as enlightened and progressive and May as fragile, unstable and weak. Because of this relational positioning he sees himself as having to walk on eggshells, therefore crediting himself with the power to hurt or protect May according to his actions. This relational positioning relies upon the concept of separation and also hides or covers over the kinds of projections or othering mechanisms that maintain this splitting. Although Stenners approach is aligned with discursive psychology and assumes that affect, feeling and emotion can be enfolded into language and discourse, it still discloses something important about the narratives of feeling and affect that are commonly reproduced in our everyday languages. What is important to this formulation of jealousy is separation: knowing where you end and the other begins. As Brennan (2004) argues: The Western psyche is structured in such a way as to give a person the sense that their affects and feelings are their own, and that they are, energetically and emotionally contained (p. 25).

Biology and affect Brennan (2004) suggests however that the literature that points towards a model of connectedness and affective transmission, rather than separation and singularity is overwhelming. The assumption of affective transmission forms the basis of a range of contemporary work within social and feminist theory that is attempting to explain the mechanisms through which affects are passed between people. This work does not discount work within feeling F.I.N.E 41

the biological and psychological sciences. Brennan argues that a position of hostility and suspicion towards the biological was a key marker of work that is described as social constructionist or as originating within a model of cultural inscription. Brennan revisits contemporary and earlier models of corporeality and attempts to rework them within a more embodied paradigm. For example, she revisits work within human endocrinology (the study of the effects of hormones on behaviour and mood), and argues that this is one area that has not been approached through a model of affective transmission. Thus, she brings together exciting work within social theory that is bringing into play a rather different notion of the communicating body with work in the biological sciences on chemical entrainment. Chemical entrainment is a concept that is used to refer to the subtle effects of hormones and pheromones that are communicated via smell and touch and that demonstrate that humans can affect and be affected at the level of the nervous system. As she argues: If olfactory communication turns a hormone into a pheromone and changes anothers affects, does it also change their hormones in a way that (temporarily) changes their habitual affective disposition. Are such changes, in turn, communicated by additional pheromones? If such cycles can be shown to hold in groups, then the contagion of affects has been explained (p. 72). However, she argues that this needs a more complex re-framing as, at this point, studies of human endocrinology start from the position of affective self-containment rather than connectedness and mixing. Brennan argues that one of the problems for social theory, and I would add critical psychology, is that science tends to work within the paradigm of social influence. We have seen how this version became sedimented within the knowledge practices of social psychology, such that alternative versions were rejected and repudiated (Despret, 2004). Thus, she argues science holds back from alternative versions or views of the communicating body, and is thus constrained by a foundational fantasy (p. 73). However, one strategy of the growing body of work on becoming within social theory (Despret, 2004) is to look for marginal work within the physical, psychological and biological sciences that raise problems and conceptual difficulties for the paradigm and assumptions of social influence models. This is an important strategy and one that
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might provide the fruitful basis of a more engaging dialogue with work in the psychological sciences that has been discounted and dismissed by the overwhelming discursive focus of much that passes as critical psychology. Brennan turns to work within psychoneuroendocrinology that is a sub-branch of work on hormonal systems that produces anomalies for the fantasy of affective self-containment. Psychoneuroendocrinology is replete with experimental studies that demonstrate that hormones can affect emotion and mood and that they appear to be passed between individuals. She argues that this work demands attention from social theorists interested in corporeality and the materiality of the body, and offers a fertile starting point for new alliances between social theory and the biological, psychological and physical sciences. The aim of an alliance or dialogue between science and social theory is the goal of a diverse range of studies working within a more embodied paradigm across social theory and critical psychology (Blackman, 2001; Connolly, 2001; Massumi, 2002; Wilson, 2004).

Conclusion: The reinvention of suggestion With this in mind I want to suggest some concepts that might be important in our re-engagement with affect, feeling and emotion across critical psychology and social theory. Recent calls for a revision of the thinking self are introducing a conception of the body that is governed by a number of key concepts: connectivity, proportionality, relationality and somatic feeling (Blackman, 2008). What this work emphasises is the radical intersection of nature and culture, the individual and the social, the inside and outside and the human and non-human, such that the idea of discrete entities interacting is beginning to lose its explanatory power. Rather what we start with is an assumption of the permeability of boundaries and the inextricable connection of mind with body, psyche with social, human with non-human and biological with cultural. This work is also introducing the importance of engaging a non-cognitive conception of embodied thought (Thrift, 2000). That is a tradition of work that is exploring the potency and centrality of nonconscious perception; of that which occurs below the threshold of conscious thought and deliberation. As Thrift argues, many philosophers and sociologists have argued that much of human life is lived in a non-cognitive mode (ibid, p. 36). Although these feeling F.I.N.E 43

moves are important and turn our attention to the role of affect and feeling in our being and becoming, we must be careful to not assume that we can simply know and add these areas of study to our analyses in an unproblematic fashion. If we focus upon practice rather than objects, we start to see that affect and feeling are produced and enacted as very diverse and varied objects across different traditions and perspectives (Mol, 2002). This article has explored some of what was repudiated in social psychologys substitution and translation of ordinary suggestion into a form of physiological automatism located in bodies considered inferior and more primitive. My current research aims to explore what suggestion could and might become when we explore its production as a variety of objects across different practices and traditions. I am particularly interested in those practices that reactivate and create connections with ordinary suggestion that do not simply negate or disqualify its possible radical potential. This is rather different to assuming we know what suggestion is and therefore can judge, evaluate and even dismiss suggestion in the evolution of our own practices. The focus shifts more to the new kinds of entities, relationships, problems, objects and questions that are made possible in different practices that enact suggestion, for example, as a particular kind of affectivity. In work on affect and feeling within cognitive science there is no mention of suggestion and only brief engagements with emotional contagion (c.f. Forgas, 2000). Affect is produced and enacted as a useful and necessary adjunct to rationality that forms the unspoken background of decision-making and evaluation. Although affect and cognition are being reintroduced as inseparable and interdependent processes, rather than separate and distinct entities, there are still problems with how to move beyond the singular, bounded individual and theorise the radical relationality of subjectivity. The focus is ultimately on the information-processing individual and the question of how the outside gets in is often thought through behaviourist models of social life (c.f., Damascio, 2000). Although work across social theory has privileged understandings of affect and feeling in theorising being and becoming the radical potential of suggestion has also been eliminated from the analyses. As we have seen, Brennan (2004) plunders the area of neuroendocrinology to provide possible answers to the puzzle of affective
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transmission. She does recognise that early work on mass psychology was an area where there once nearly was a theory of the transmission of affect, but that the mechanism of transmission was not effectively explained (p. 51). Much like McDougall and other early social psychologists such as Floyd Henry Allport (1924), she dismisses suggestibility, although as we will see in the following quote she also derides McDougall for even considering suggestion in his translation of the concept as a form of primitive sympathetic response: With this principle, McDougall came very close to my argument, although it is unclear what his primitive sympathetic response consisted of, partly because he did not free himself from the rhetoric of suggestibility (ibid, p. 55). Brennan suggests that the biochemical literature on entrainment within the area of neuro-endocrinology would be a better place to consider the problem of affective transmission. Like much of the exciting work within this new paradigm, the turn to affect is a way of re-inventing the emotional, re-engaging the materiality of bodies and displacing the centrality of cognitivist and rationalist models for understanding sociality and subject formation. However, I will argue that this work is also part of an anti-mimetic2 turn that originated within the work of early psychologists and sociologists who attempted to eliminate suggestion from their theorising (c.f. Blackman, 2007b, 2008b). It seems that work in the psychological and social sciences tends to start from the position that suggestion is a primitive physiological automatism and therefore of little use to critical analysis. However, I hope that I have convinced you that ordinary suggestion remains in the background, raising problems for the view of affective self-containment which became assumed alongside its repudiation. Christian Borch (2006) has argued that suggestion should be opened up to new theoretical horizons within social theory. Although I am not arguing that suggestion is a timeless object that can simply be recovered by critical psychological or social inquiry, we need to be mindful of what suggestion could and might become in our analyses. The concept of becoming and its articulation as the subjects capacity to affect and be affected (Despret, 2004; Latour, 2004), might usefully be augmented by a return to some of the background versions that make this concept a possibility. The knowledge practices of social psychology provide a useful starting place for such a project of reactivation and recovery.

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Notes
1. Enactment is a term that Mol (2002) uses to refer to the processes through which practices engender or bring into being particular kinds of objects and entities. The focus on enactment shifts attention away from the idea of singular pre-existing objects, to the ways in which practices alter, transform, interact and shape objects through diverse and various practices. As she argues: What we think of as a single object may appear to be more than one (p. vii). This article will adopt such a praxiographic inquiry (p. 32) by exploring the ways in which the psychological sciences have enacted suggestion and the ways in which the multiple forms of suggestion that we find across psychological practices are related. 2. Ruth Leys (2000) uses the term anti-mimetic to refer to a range of approaches and traditions across the humanities and social sciences that shifted attention to conscious will and deliberation as the normative markers of personhood. This created a suspicion and mistrust of suggestion and a move away from models of imitation and contagion, other than as more primitive forms of communication. This was mirrored by a dismissal of hypnotic technologies of suggestion, which were assumed to operate through the removal of will. This equates to the popular parlance that hypnosis is a form of brainwashing or manipulation, for example.

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