Silvan Tomkins Reader, edited by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank

In their presentation of the work of Silvan Tompkins, they have presented—as Richard Grusin has recently suggested (to a seminar of graduate students at Wayne State University in Detroit)—their Silvan Tompkins. Not noting the origin or extent of their omissions, only that they are there (by way of ellipses), the editors do admit to having their ellipsis cover over paragraph breaks, and even chapter breaks, which indicates a greater level of omission than that usually covered by such a scholarly procedure. And they make a great case for this in their introduction, which feels more like an article on Silvan Tompkins than an introduction: it introduces him as a figure worthy of investigating, thanks mostly to their rescue of his corpus from the dustbin of contemporary theory, despite what other theory heads may make of his essentialist conception of affect.
Indicting theory (spelled with a capital T, as with Being, or Blackness, both of which come out of a theory reading and responding community that they are both a part of and indeed hope will buy the book) as immediately dismissing any essentialist concepts out of hand, they propose that the fear of any numerable account of affect—Tompkins proposes a schema of affect which is limited to eight members (Interest-Excitement; Enjoyment-Joy; Surprise-Startle; Distress-Anguish; Fear-Terror; Shame-Humiliation; Contempt-Disgust; Anger-Rage)—is nigh automatic on the part of theory after the poststructuralist intervention, mainly because of the latter’s reliance on the infinite suggested by multiplicity. Multiplicity arises in theory today because of an unreasonable (to them) fear of the limitations placed on agency by the enlightenment and humanist project of infinite perfectibility and the separation of subject and object, or writing and speech, or any of the attendant binaries explored in post-enlightenment philosophy. So, post-structuralism mounts a sort of enlightenment critique, but (contra the editors of this volume) I would suggest that the enlightenment project is still very much a part of post-structuralist thinking, so much so that the editors have nothing to fear. There is no possibility that “reflexive antibiologism” (8) such as they contend will erupt out of the scholarly investigation of a schema such as that proposed by Silvan Tompkins.
Pointing out that the lists Tompkins produces operate on both postmodernist and modernist paradigms, in that they are subject both to radical contingency in their possible permutations and a fixed typology and character that would suggest more probable and felicitous combinations over others, they suggest that Tompkins’s work in this way offers a sort of “productive opacity” (13). And in proposing a system of “finitely many (n>2) values” (15) they wish to avoid the automatic burden of the concept of innateness that would suggest that these schematized affects are a limit on affect, or that they would come to proscribe the human. They say access to this system of thinking not routinized to the dictates of post-structuralist theory is important because this thought-realm, “the analogic realm of finitely many values [… could enable] a political vision of difference that might resist both binary homogenization and infinitizing trivialization” (15), and who would argue? Especially after they assure us that they “have no interest whatever in minimizing the continuing history of racist, sexist, homophobic, or otherwise abusive biologisms, or the urgency of their exposure, that has made the gravamen of so many contemporary projects of critique” (15). And their logic as to why we can’t seem to conceive of affect except as finitely many? It’s this: “[s]omehow [not a good start, post-structurally or otherwise] it’s hard to hold onto [a finitely many valued concept] without a biological model in the vicinity” (15), which they blame on some momentum-of-modernism argument of conceptual vacuity, which has so de-frictionized the floors upon which theorists stand that in order to get a grip, they must have the friction—ostensibly originating from the blood and guts spilled in its name—of a biological model. And their assurances aside, this is not so convincing, and here’s why: the post-structuralist intervention in hierarchy (say Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome instead of an arboreal model), rational presence (as with Derrida’s related concepts of trace and différance instead of a positivist model of sense certainty), or progress (as with Lyotard’s concept of the inhuman instead of an ever-rapacious concept of humanism which would take its own achievements to be of the most importance, a form of instrumental logic, that is, progress by any means) owes everything to the enlightenment thinking it wishes to critique, and these critiques are, moreover, themselves instances of the further progress of the enlightenment. And whatever habits the editors have identified as being injurious to further development of thought realms are habits of the same historical moment of these editors have pointed out is Tompkins’s own. In combating an automatic tendency on the part of post-structuralist thinking they risk relying on another default thought-realm, and in avoiding one danger, they open themselves up to charges of avowing the horrors that they themselves make pains to point out, though they would of course claim to want to land somewhere in the middle, between poles of unitary logic and paralytic multiplicity. And this is perhaps most disturbing, for if they are the arbiters of truth value (even if it’s only the seemingly harmless exploration of a thought-realm), then they are also its sovereign, living and theorizing in a state of exception: not subject to a prohibition that they use to establish power, in the form of a discursive formation that they characterize as some willy-nil theory war.
Does this indict Tompkins’s work? No, and it never did. In the comfortable space of finitely many there’s lots of room. And in the safe harbor of a logic that still owes its ass to enlightenment thinking the limits of Tompkins become apparent: innate, perhaps, but as Tompkins describes it, as innate as a nervous system; limited, perhaps, but only by a concept of infinity that would theoretically never be reached. I don’t see the harm, in looking at Tompkins for what he does offer. We don’t indict Freud for using a tri-partite system to schematize the conscious/unconscious divide, as limiting as that is (Lacan’s elaborations not-withstanding). At one point he makes a claim not to innateness, but inevitability (67), and we can dismiss these as concordant enough to be invalid. At another point, he makes claims based on specious citations, such as that based on Bloom’s assertion that toned musculature and proper posture are required to initiate intellectual problem solving (65), and we can dismiss this on account of his particular historical position (1962, well before the watershed of high theory in 1968). But the usefulness of concepts like the central assembly and the General Image of power, are both worth checking out, just as Heidegger is still worth checking out, just as Darwin is still worth checking out, but I’m afraid that I can’t say that’s what the editors are in for, even as they claim that’s their aim. And this is because the stakes are so high—extinction, the biologism of eugenics come back in the new genetic therapy available only to the rich, the eradication of sexual choice because one has been proven biologically straight or gay—that one slip could do it. And I don’t endorse prohibition. But in a choice between license and freedom, I’ll take freedom, and I don’t think that’s automatic—I find it considered.