Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 42 Familiarity and no Pleasure. The Uncanny as an Aesthetic Emotion.
Jan Niklas Howe
Abstract (E): The article explores whether the feeling of the uncanny can be regarded as an aesthetic emotion. It is centred around a reading of Freud’s famous essay that is complemented by an exploration of Aristotle’s theory of repetition and current psychological attempts to define aesthetic pleasure by means of repetition, namely, the hypotheses of ‘mere exposure’, ‘prototypicality’, and ‘cognitive fluency’. The article demonstrates that the notion of the uncanny problematises the very concept of aesthetic emotions.
Abstract (F): Cet article se demande si la sensation de l’inquiétante étrangeté peut être considérée comme une émotion esthétique. Il propose une nouvelle lecture du célèbre article de Freud, qu’il approfondit en faisant appel à la théorie aristotélicienne de la répétition ainsi qu’aux tentatives de la psychologie contemporaine de définir le plaisir esthétique en termes de répétition –hypothèses souvent rattachées aux concepts de « influence par contact », « prototypicalité » et « aisance cognitive ». L’article démontre que l’inquiétante étrangeté problématise la notion même d’émotion esthétique.
Keywords: Aesthetic Emotion, Cognitive Fluency, Freud, Mere Exposure, Prototypicality, Repetition, Uncanny
With regard to the Freudian “uncanny”, much attention has been paid to its literary and intellectual history, the questions of how it informs other psychoanalytic terms, how it relates to its opposite and how it can be used to define modernity. Much less attention has been given to the question of what it actually is, possibly because Freud’s answer appears to be so self-evident. Freud’s classification of the concept of the uncanny contains two components: he defines it firstly as an emotion and secondly as an object of aesthetics that psychology may approach only in exceptional cases and carefully. According to this classification, the uncanny belongs to a
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 43 category that is referred to as “aesthetic emotions” in current psychological research. In the course of his famous essay, however, the distinction between the “real” and “fantastic” aspects of the uncanny becomes increasingly blurred; in the closing of Freud’s text, the concept denotes an explicitly real emotion that is nevertheless constituted aesthetically. Central to this twofold designation is the idea of repetition. As the uncanny marks a sphere of indistinguishability between fantastic and real stimulation, expectable artistic effect and true surprise, an investigation into the concept allows an insight into the relation between “real” and “aesthetic” emotions.
In the following, I will read Freud’s essay in two systematic steps, the first of which will focus on the uncanny as an aesthetic emotion based on unintended repetition, and the second of which will refer to the uncanny as a real emotion with a more complicated relation to the figure of repetition. Both readings are connected by a brief review of Aristotle’s concept of aesthetic pleasure induced by repetition, and an introduction to recent psychological theories of emotion. With respect to the scientific hypotheses of “mere exposure”, “prototypicality” and “cognitive fluency”, I shall demonstrate that the specific group of aesthetic emotions to which the uncanny belongs is based on processes of repetition. The negative or positive valence of the emotions in question depends on the degree to which the structures that condition its repeated appearance can be traced. The criterion of intended versus unintended repetition enables us to refrain from defining aesthetic emotions primarily by their emergence from confrontations with works of art, a classification that the intermediary status of the uncanny reveals to be problematic in itself. I will argue that aesthetic emotions are not generic, real emotions in the context of art reception, as is broadly assumed in current debates. They can, with the exception of preferences linked to neophilia, more convincingly be defined as “levelling transformations” of specific affects by means of their repetition. Consequently, the occurrence of uncanny phenomena in reality can be described as a dislocation of aesthetic pleasure that is necessarily followed by aversion, a case of “life behaving like art” – this is how Francis Bacon describes the third discipline of science alongside natural and cultural history. Bacon claims that these “instantiae deviantes”, “errores naturae” and monstra” (Bacon 410) allow us to analyse the foundations of both of the other disciplines.
According to Freud, the uncanny is primarily an emotion. He occasionally refers to it as an objective quality, for example when explaining the “character” of the uncanny as a possible
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 44 description of a stimulus (PS 259), but in the same sentence he continues to speak of the “feeling of the uncanny”. The fact that the word “uncanny” may denote unpleasant persons, objects or processes (such as being buried alive) on the one hand and the corresponding emotion on the other, accounts for a certain haziness of the concept. Within Freud’s essay, however, the classification of the uncanny as an attribute to objects or constellations is clearly dominated by its use as a description of a subjective state. He repeatedly refers to it in this sense: “Eindruck des Unheimlichen” (PS 244), “dieses Gefühl” (PS 244), “das Gefühl des Unheimlichen” (PS 250).
As the gist (“wesentlichen Inhalt”, PS 263) of his essay, Freud presents two hypotheses: first, that the uncanny is defined by unintended repetition; and second, that it maintains an integral connection with its counterpart (the “Heimliches”). It is this second thesis that has received most attention in Freud studies, which is all the more surprising given that it merely contains a variation of the first, which provides us with a precise description of what kind of emotion the uncanny is: a particular form of fear that is derived from the return of something repressed (PS 263). The source of the uncanny feeling is the moment of an unplanned repetition of the same – it is vital to my argument that the repetition has to be unintentional to produce an uncanny affect. “Something repressed” contains an infinite number of original affects that can be transformed into fear by (1) being repressed and (2) violently returning, “and it must be a matter of indifference whether what is uncanny was itself originally frightening or whether it carried some other affect.” (SE 241, PS 264) The uncanny is, hence, a secondary or derived emotion that can originate, for example, in repressed anger, fear or disgust. Whichever the original emotion was, it becomes fear by means of repression and return. I would like to refer to this process, whereby heterogeneous original emotions are transformed into one specific emotion, as “aesthetic levelling”.
In Freud’s work, the idea of a return of the repressed marks a decisive turn. Parallel to his studies on the uncanny, he develops the concept of repetition compulsion (cf. Weber 208, Derrida 279) and radically revises his conception of drives, famously complementing it with the “death drive” in Beyond the Pleasure Principle. His 1914 essay on the history of the psychoanalytic movement (Geschichte der psychoanalytischen Bewegung) regards the theorem of repression as an indispensible basis for all psychoanalytic work (PS III 105, 109 f). The return of the repressed has at this point become equally central (PS III, 115). Freud declares that processes of successful repression rarely play a role in psychoanalytic practice for two reasons:
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 45 firstly, they do not yield pathological consequences and therefore do not make psychoanalytic investigation necessary; and secondly, they can hardly be reconstructed and therefore do not make psychoanalytic investigation possible. If psychoanalysis is chiefly concerned with unsuccessful or incomplete processes of repression, it must focus on cases in which the repressed affect returns and is transformed into fear. Since Freud has used this very description to define uncanny phenomena, the feeling of the uncanny itself must be a central category of psychoanalysis – or at least it should be. Such a central status is undermined by the initial classificatory gesture, according to which uncanny feelings belong to the group of “subdued emotional impulses which, inhibited in their aims and dependent on a host of concurrent factors” (PS 243, SE 219). Freud even states that within the sphere of curbed and irrelevant aesthetic sensations, the uncanny holds a specifically remote position:
But it does occasionally happen that he has to interest himself in some particular province of that subject; and this province usually proves to be a rather remote one, and one which has been neglected in the specialist literature of aesthetics. The subject of the ‘uncanny’ is a province of this kind. (PS 243, SE 219)
This designation as a mere and remote aesthetic issue seems unreasonable with regard to the vitality of unintended repetition for psychoanalysis; yet Freud throughout the first two parts of his essay consequently follows it by focusing on Hoffmann’s tale, Der Sandmann. This strategy seems further justified by the dictionary entries compiled at the outset which are entirely dominated by references to literary history: Sander’s Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, together with Schelling, cites Gutzkow’s Ritter vom Geiste, Chamisso’s Vetter Anselmo, and Heine’s Geständnisse; and the brothers Grimm quote Klinger. But to derive an essentially literary quality from this prevalence would be to rash: the main aim of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century dictionaries was, besides attempting to point to the origins of words, to re-trace historical and contemporary applications of the concepts in question. They could do so only by referring to written records at hand, a major part of which was naturally literary. This accounts for the accumulation of literary examples not only with regard to the uncanny, but also to central concepts from the realm of law and economy that do not easily pass as primarily aesthetic concepts. Similarly, only a small number of Freud’s own examples are derived from his own psychological practice, as the majority are taken from the literary canon, the advantage of
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 46 Schiller’s Ring des Polykrates and Goethe’s Faust in this context being their instantaneous accessibility for the educated readers of psychoanalytic publications. The primary reasons for a predominance of examples from literary history are hence not to be found in the aesthetic qualities of the concept of the uncanny itself, but in the frequency of its use – Freud strangely pointed out that he began working on psychoanalysis “because it had no literature”, meaning, of course, scientific literature (cf. Hertz 1979, p. 296).
The centrality of the Sandman narrative is symptomatic of this lack of scientific sources. However, the predominance of this literary example necessarily shapes and informs the analysis of the uncanny, which in the first part of Freud’s essay appears as a purely aesthetic concept. Already Freud’s predecessor Jentsch had testified that in Hoffmann’s tale the “psychological manoeuvre” of blurring the demarcations between animated and unanimated matter had “been carried out successfully”. Jentsch’s definition of the uncanny is centred on this very uncertainty and has been rightly criticised by Freud (PS 251). A parallel between both psychological readers of Hoffmann’s tale lies in the non-restrictive admiration for the “most secure artistic technique” (Jentsch 203) and the “unrivalled master of the uncanny in literature” (Freud, SE 233, PS 257). Both readings strongly link the uncanny to skilful artistic manipulation. Freud’s superlative adds a competitive notion: the uncanny can be generated by means of artistic skills that can be measured by affective reader response; it appears as a goal-orientated mode of production, a technique.
An obvious conclusion from this double allocation of the uncanny, explicitly at the margins of art and implicitly at the centre of psychoanalysis, has frequently been drawn, for instance by G.C. Tholen, who writes of psychoanalysis that “specifically its metapsychological, that is genuinely analytic insights are due to literary contexts” (Tholen 90, my translation). Friedrich Kittler has somewhat pessimistically pointed out that, as a last possible turn resulting from this interconnection, psychoanalytically informed literary research will have to focus on “finding little Freuds among the poets” (Kittler 197). I would like to defer any propositions relating to the historic connection between literature and psychoanalysis or possible literary traits of Freud’s essay. Instead, I shall focus on the propositions that can be made about the feeling of the uncanny if we follow Freud’s hypothesis that it is an emotion and belongs to the realm of aesthetics. For Freud, the uncanny is an affect of no pleasure at all, intrinsically linked with art reception and, more specifically, with the artistic device of repetition. The structural
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 47 interdependence of aesthetic emotion and repetition is a commonplace of classical philosophical analyses of aesthetic pleasure, as can be illustrated by a brief reference to Aristotle’s Poetics.
It is a topos of mimesis theory that works of art, by reproducing possible realities, produce only certain and very specific affective responses. Aristotle discusses two central cultural techniques of affect production by means of mimesis: comedy evokes amusement by portraying the actions of protagonists “worse than real”; tragedy evokes eleos and phobos by portraying the actions of protagonists “better than real”. Both forms of drama double and reproduce realities, with the constraint that the real is not configured as what has really happened, but as “what may happen, what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity” (Aristotle IX). At the same time, both comedy and tragedy modify each probable or necessary reality, by degrading or idealising it respectively. The result is a levelling of affective responses. For a Greek tragedy to succeed, Aristotle argues, its audience, a large number of individuals who form a homogenous group only in terms of gender and social class, had to share collectively one specific emotional and intellectual experience.
The process of affective levelling that Aristotle describes transforms the representation of generic affects within the artwork into art-specific affects among its recipients. Tragedy is defined by portraying consequent actions, that is, actions that can be derived plausibly from protagonists’ character traits, which in turn are defined as steady sets of likes and dislikes. Aristotle’s key references besides Greek tragedy, the Homeric epics, essentially portray action as the outcome of an affective state, such as the rage of Achilles or the faithful love of Odysseus. The emotions evoked – which marks the parallel to the Freudian concept outlined above – are independent from the emotions portrayed, and will inevitably consist of either amusement about that part of the ugly that Aristotle defines as “the ridiculous” or the double affect eleos/phobos. Moreover, if we take into account Aristotle’s conception of visual arts, both forms of aesthetic pleasure – for both affects are positively evaluated – can be further reduced to the “pleasure of recognition”, that is, an intellectually informed pleasure in subsuming artistic objects under familiar categories and concepts. This aesthetic pleasure, according to Aristotle, forms the basis of emotional appropriation of artistically modified contents. A reading of the poetics that would fully reconstruct the processes of representing and producing affective responses does not belong to the goals of this paper; I would like to summarize Aristotle only with regard to this simple hypothesis: aesthetic emotions are the result of a process of repetition, in which originally
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 48 heterogeneous affective states on the side of the production of a work of art are levelled on the part of the recipient. By picturing, narrating or staging any random “real” emotion, works of art provoke an affectively homogenous reception that cognitive psychology refers to as “aesthetic emotions”. There are, of course, significant differences between reiterating repressed affects as in Freud’s essay on the uncanny and the artistic reiteration of possible realities, but the structural analogy of linking artistic technique and repetition in order to define aesthetic emotions suffices for the following argument. This brief excursion to Aristotle has shown that a poetics of levelling repetition has been at the core of philosophical theory of aesthetic emotions from its very beginnings. In the following, I will sketch three approaches from recent psychological aesthetics that could be referred to as “Aristotelian” in the sense that they are centred on the concepts of repetition, familiarity and recognition: the hypotheses of mere exposure, prototypicality, and cognitive fluency.
Zajonc, Markus and Wilson (1974) document “the enhancement of attractiveness of a stimulus object by means of repeated exposure” (248). In their experiments, participants were repeatedly confronted with stimuli of both negative and positive initial appraisal, following the hypothesis that aesthetic preference directly depends on mere exposure. The results showed that all stimuli except those that were initially evaluated as highly negative were assessed more positively in proportional relation to the growing number of encounters. The evaluations that were prompted ranged from assessments of complexity to aesthetic preferences and moral judgments, as scales included the oppositions “like-dislike, bad-good, handsome-ugly, honest-dishonest, simple-complex, familiar-unfamiliar” (253). The most obvious rise in positive evaluation was achieved by the familiarity curve; however, along with it, all stimuli were gradually rated more positively with respect to all other categories at a growing rate of exposure. In their interpretation of this “mere exposure” effect (cf. Zajonc 1966) the authors arrive at the conclusion that sole familiarity with an objective stimulus raises its attractiveness. Recognition appears to improve normative judgments of aesthetic as well as of ethical nature.
Martindale/Moore (1988) regard aesthetic pleasure as a “rather mild sort of pleasure that is induced by aesthetic perceptions that do not arouse strong emotions” (661). Aesthetic emotions are not limited to art reception, but include reactions to sunsets, facial attractiveness or elegant mathematical operations: “Many of the everyday pleasures of life are of an aesthetic nature”. A central role is assigned to the effect of recognition that Martindale/Moore refer to as
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 49 the activation of pre-existing “cognitive units”. Aesthetic pleasure is explained by means of prototypicality, or, differently put: preference is a positive function of typicality (663). This hypothesis is substantiated by experiments with coloured chips: The closer a colour came to a prototypical norm colour, the stronger the preference indicated by participants. The possibility of comparison to chips closer to such a norm significantly lowered the preferences indicated for less prototypical chips; experiments further proved that conceptions of a prototypical colour are subject to change through such comparisons (669). In sum: the proximity to a pre-established (although partly modifiable) concept of a colour or image determines aesthetic like or dislike. If it is easy to subsume the stimulus in a category, then this produces aesthetic pleasure; if a stimulus fails to meet these categorical standards, however, it is assessed negatively. The easier and more unambiguous the assignment to a familiar category, the greater the aesthetic preference tends to be.
The cognitive fluency hypothesis presented by Reber/Schwartz/Winkielman (2004) distinguishes itself from objectivist approaches to aesthetic preferences by proposing an “interactionist” model of aesthetic experience. Beauty is neither the attribute of an object, nor is it a mere function of subjective perception; rather, beauty is a product of the interplay of both components. Accordingly, the concepts of “beauty” and “aesthetic pleasure” are “interchangeable” (365). The central hypothesis is this: “The more fluently the perceiver can process an object, the more positive is his or her aesthetic response.” (365) Aesthetic pleasure is felt towards objects that contain little information, objects that facilitate access to the information they contain by means of a symmetrical structure, and objects easily identifiable by clear contrasts. This fluency theorem is highly compatible with the idea of aesthetic prototypicality: forms that are easily recognisable produce aesthetic pleasure, as do forms that are known from experience. “Ease of recall” and “familiarity” (373) predict positive aesthetic evaluations; however, the authors are well aware of the obvious problems that abstract, complex or even hermetic artworks pose for their suggestion (p. 374-376).
Still more recent experiments that cannot be classified by one of these three models affirm the supposition that repetition plays a vital role in the constitution of aesthetic emotions. Juslin/Vjästfall (2008) explain certain emotional responses to music as an activation of nostalgic associations by proving that the term “like” for music is heavily dependent on personal memories connected to the piece in question. The participants of the experiment specifically liked music
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 50 from their youth, which adds to the Aristotelian positions sketched above a notion of sentimental, that is personal and retrospective levelling reproduction of affective states (as opposed to general and possible/probable reproductions). It seems to be a standard concept of psychological aesthetics that repetition, familiarity and recognition lead to positive aesthetic evaluations. Since my investigation in aesthetic emotions chose the rather unpleasant feeling of the uncanny as a starting point, it must inquire into the negative effects of repetition. Mere exposure, prototypicality and cognitive fluency as models for aesthetic preference allow only a limited number of predictions with regard to aesthetic aversion or the category of negative aesthetic emotions. Any attempt to derive definitions of negative aesthetic emotions (such as anger or disgust) from an inversion of the definitions of positive aesthetic emotions as presented above leads to counterintuitive hypotheses in all three cases:
1. Anything new creates aesthetic aversion (inverted mere exposure hypothesis). This prediction is not explicitly made by Zajonc, who characterises mere exposure as a sufficient, but not as a necessary condition of aesthetic pleasure. It furthermore contradicts numerous predictions about aesthetic pleasure from classical rhetoric (Cicero’s “variatio delectat”) to evolutionary theory (Darwin’s “love of the new”).
2. Anything which is not prototypical creates aesthetic aversion (inverted prototypicality hypothesis). The experiments conducted by Martindale and Moore suggest the possibility of such an inverted conclusion; the authors have, however, explicitly acknowledged the possibility of new and non-prototypical stimuli as sources of aesthetic pleasure, only to a significantly lower degree (Martindale/Moore/West 1988).
3. Anything complex creates aesthetic aversion (inverted fluency hypothesis). The authors cited above distinctly thwart such a conclusion by introducing the category of “meaningfulness”: “Complexity may sometimes be preferred because it facilitates access to the meaning of the stimulus” (Reber/Schwarz/Winkielman 374). Complexity of a stimulus does not automatically imply aesthetic aversion.
None of these theories, we must conclude, provide at first sight a sustainable model for systematically observing negative aesthetic emotions. With regard to the uncanny, according to Freud’s definition a type of fear based on repetition, familiarity and recognition, their application becomes even more difficult since all three models are “Aristotelian” in their tendency to regard repetition, familiarity and recognition as constitutive for aesthetic pleasure. This propensity is
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 51 often referred to as the “positivity bias” of psychological aesthetics. Specifically, the recognition of “prototypical” humans or animals in images can be linked easily to Aristotle’s concept of the “joy of recognition” as an anthropological constant: “Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring, and saying perhaps, 'Ah, that is he.'” (Aristotle, IV) The very recognition of something familiar, however, is what transforms an object – be it something inwardly repressed or a material other – into something uncanny.
Familiarity, in all of these models, produces positive aesthetic emotions, more specifically aesthetic preference and the sensation of beauty. Familiarity is, as outlined above, also the source of uncanny feelings which must be regarded as a negative emotion; however, it shares with the aesthetic pleasures based on repetition three equally essential characteristics. “Beauty”, like the uncanny, is used to describe a stimulus as well as the corresponding sensation it evokes. Both terms are furthermore used to describe sensations towards “real” as well as “fantastic” stimulation: a sunset and a poem may both be referred to as beautiful. The Kantian distinction between “natural” and “artificial beauty” suggests that aesthetic judgements rely on a coincidence, if not confusion, of natural and artistic stimuli. (Kant 191) Thirdly and most importantly, they share a secondary quality or what I have earlier termed a “levelling effect”. Freud notes that any original affect, “no matter which” (“gleichgültig welcher Affekt”, PS 263), is transformed into fear by the process of suppression and unintended return. This corresponds to an essential characteristic of artistic representation: whether a person is portrayed as sad, angry or happy has little impact on the possibility of appraising it as beautiful. In both cases, it is the recognition of a familiar stimulus that necessitates a replacement of the original (represented or repressed) emotion by a secondary one. Simply redoubling this primary emotion, by means of sympathy in art reception or by an identical reiteration of a suppressed affect in reality, is made impossible by the emphasis on the repetition process itself that is created by deliberately imitated or forcefully returning emotions. The counter-intuitive analogy of beauty and the uncanny is justified by this common structure: any particular affect, “no matter which”, is, by means of repetition/familiarity/recognition, transformed into a specifically aesthetic emotion.
What distinguishes the uncanny from other aesthetic emotions derived from familiarity is the fact that it is not, at least not primarily, pleasant. The difference between pleasant repetition in artworks and unpleasant repetition seems to be a question of stimulus appraisal. Sylvia and
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 52 Brown (2007) define appraisal-based approaches to emotion as follows: “Appraisal theories of emotion propose that emotions come from people’s evaluations of events, particularly evaluations of how events relate to important goals, values and concerns.” (Sylvia/Brown 2007, p. 101)
This approach focuses on the subject of the emotion: emotions are not produced by stimuli, but by the way in which they are evaluated. To each emotion is attributed a specific “appraisal structure”: Joy, for instance, is the result of a positive event evaluation of “goal relevance” and “goal congruence”; fear, on the other hand, results from evaluating an event as goal relevant and goal obstructive, combined with a low coping potential. An appraisal model of aesthetic emotions as presented in Sylvia/Brown must be differentiated from the approaches outlined above in two respects: firstly, aesthetic emotions are defined more narrowly as “emotions evoked by perceiving art” (Frijda, 1547). Secondly, appraisal theories assume that there is no specific appraisal structure for aesthetic preference or aversion. Among Frijda’s Laws of Emotion (1988) there is a “law of apparent reality”. It states that every stimulus that produces an emotion must seem real to the recipient. Kerry Walters (1989) has raised the objection that aesthetic emotions are not included in this conception:
It is not clear that Frijda’s law applies comfortably to emotional experiences elicited by what broadly can be categorised as art objects or events. […] The crucial point is that there is an emotional response to events that in no way do I take to be real. However, if emotional intensity is proportionate to reality-belief, there should be no emotional response at all.” (Walters 1545).
Frijda's answer contains a precise and often-repeated definition of aesthetic emotions as “emotions evoked by perceiving art”, (1547) and denies that they have a specific structure. According to Frijda, emotional reactions to artworks are cases of observing interaction and refer to events that are not relevant for one’s own well-being, but for that of others. This plausibly explains phenomena such as sympathy with novel protagonists or the fear of a film monster; it does not, however, account for emotional responses to art that are specific to art reception. Similarly, Lazarus’ groundbreaking study (that surprisingly, incorporates religious emotions into the realm of aesthetics) glances only briefly at aesthetic emotions:
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 53 I must conclude that no special concepts are needed for aesthetic emotions that are not found in cognitive-motivational-relational formulations about emotion in general and about the individual emotions in particular. (Lazarus 295f)
Lazarus claims that generally every emotion qualifies as an aesthetic emotion; he suggests describing reactions to artworks in analogy to reactions to “real” events, distinguishing both by their relevance to the life of the recipient. Art perception becomes a laboratory succession of make-belief events which allow the painless practice of emotional skills.
In an attempt to overcome the “positivity bias” in theories of aesthetic emotions, Sylvia/Brown (2007) introduce the possibility of concrete negative aesthetic emotions. Referring to Scherer’s and Lazarus’ models of appraisal, the authors prove by experiment that reactions to works of art can be negative, thus qualifying “fear, anger, sadness, disgust, and contempt” as “feelings in response to art”. The experiment confronts participants with neutral and “offensive” stimuli, requesting feedback on their cognitive evaluation as well as on their emotional reactions. The results demonstrate a high degree of congruence between negative evaluation (this image is contrary to my values/beliefs) and negative emotions (I am angry). Sylvia and Brown conclude that a) negative aesthetic emotions exist, and generally all negative “real” emotions qualify and b) there is an intrinsic connection between emotional responses to a work of art and the appraisal of that work of art as incongruent with one’s goals or values. With the terminological instruments provided by appraisal theories, the uncanny can, in uncontroversial phrasing compatible with Freud’s definition, be defined as a form of fear: it is goal relevant in the sense of being a strong affect, goal obstructive in the sense of a negative affect, and the subject’s coping potential is extremely low: there is nothing one could “do” about an uncanny encounter.
Sylvia and Brown evaluate participants’ likes and dislikes in a highly normative way (“in a time when ignorance about the arts is high”, 101) and do not always distinguish clearly between emotions felt towards the artwork and those felt towards the artist held responsible. The latter appears to be symptomatic of an art reception centred on authorship, but the insight it provides will be helpful to define the uncanny: aesthetic preferences rely greatly on what we know about the source of the stimulus. What is more problematic in this context is that, according to the fundamental appraisal-based definition of aesthetic emotions, they are “real” emotions in weakened, aesthetically mediated, form. The fact that the uncanny undoubtedly does
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 54 not only occur in confrontation with artworks and, at the same time, provides a strong sensation independently of its context of occurrence calls into question Freud’s categorisation of the uncanny as an object of aesthetics.
Returning to Freud, I will attempt to show that it is precisely the problem of authorship or rather source knowledge that provides the uncanny encounter with an exceptional status between real and aesthetic emotions. Freud concludes the middle section of his essay with the following observation:
There is one more point of general application which I should like to add [...] that an uncanny effect is often and easily produced when the distinction between imagination and reality is effaced, as when something that we have hitherto regarded as imaginary appears before us in reality, or when a symbol takes over the full functions of the thing it symbolizes, and so on. (Freud 267)
As I pointed out at the beginning of this paper, the impossibility of distinguishing between a real and fantastic source of the uncanny sensation arises from the analytic strategy which Freud adopts in his essay, and in particular from the examples he chooses. He strongly encourages his readers to take as case studies a Hauffian fairy tale, a passage from Faust or Hoffmann’s tale of Nathanael and the Sandman. There is only one concrete example of a real occurrence of something uncanny that has a significant impact on the argument of the essay. This example refers to an autobiographical episode during which Freud returns repeatedly but unwillingly to a street reputed for its high levels of prostitution. This anecdote, however, is so strongly furnished with literary markers that without introducing it as a real event, it would be barely distinguishable from the fictional examples. Even its first sentence is highly evocative of an artistic first person narrative: „As I was walking, one hot summer afternoon, through the deserted streets of a provincial town in Italy which was unknown to me, I found myself in a quarter of whose character I could not long remain in doubt.” (PS 260, SE 237). The fictional marker “once”, used in connection with the topoi of the “summer afternoon”, the deserted space and the aimless flânerie of a central European in Italy all indicate an experienced writer of fiction; the small town is anonymised, the experience adjusted to a limited narrator. The interrelation between fictional and real stimuli in Freud’s text is famously problematic, but the deconstruction of a binary conception of science and literature is not intended here; nevertheless, it seems
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 55 important to note that the distinction between “real” and “fictitious” stimuli, as it is introduced at a very late point in the text, breaks with Freud’s premise that the uncanny is an aesthetic emotion. Freud’s claim, „that in the first place a great deal that is not uncanny in fiction would be so if it hapaned in real life; and in the second place that there are many more means of creating uncanny effects in fiction than there are in real life.” (PS 272, SE 249; the accentuation is Freud’s), can be used productively not only to describe the interdependence between a psychoanalytic and a literary concept, but also the relation between aesthetic and real emotions.
It is not until the final section of the essay that Freud attempts to distinguish between the real and the fantastic uncanny. This distinction serves as an answer to counter-examples and possible objections to his definition: Snow White’s awakening from death is not uncanny, nor is the mythical animation of Pygmalion’s statue. Freud suggests a new distinction between “ the uncanny that we actually experience and the uncanny that we merely picture or read about.“ (PS 269, SE 247) For the moment, this solves the problem that objects, constellations or figures, which according to definition should yield uncanny effects in fiction, sometimes fail to do this; according to Freud, the expert reader adjusts to the writer’s preliminaries and treats hauntings as real events within the fictional framework, which disqualifies them as sources of uncanny unease – there is no “conflict of judgment” (PS 266, SE 250). Freud then provides a more precise classification: the real uncanny is divided into a) cases of returning intellectual insecurity towards (mostly animistic) conceptions which have been overcome, and b) cases of a return of suppressed infantile complexes. The fantastic uncanny is distinguished by its proximity to reality. The degree to which a reality is suggested determines the probability of an uncanny encounter: the potential to trigger an uncanny feeling is barely given in fairy tales and much more common in realistic narrative. The uncanny in fiction is, according to Freud, far “more fertile” (PS 271, SE 249), „for it contains the whole of the latter and something more besides, something that cannot be found in real life“. This implies that every uncanny feeling that is a response to a real stimulus could also be triggered by a fictive stimulus or at least be represented in a fictitious text. This conclusion is compatible with Lazarus’ hypothesis that all emotions are potentially aesthetic emotions; however, Freud expands the validity of the aesthetic emotion (the fictitious uncanny) beyond the borders of the real emotion. Any real emotion can be matched by an aesthetic pendant; there are, however, aesthetic emotions that are not constructed parallel to real ones, but constitute a category of genuinely aesthetic likes and dislikes.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 56 As a counterpart to reality, Freud discusses fiction, not art in general. The instruments used to create uncanny sensations which are available to the poet are identical to those he has praised in Hoffmann: the narrative must be strongly grounded in reality and only successively introduce doubts and uncertainties. Compared to real events, the recipient’s appraisal may naturally reach a higher degree and variety of doubt. What has significantly changed in the third section of the essay is the normative vocabulary: making use of the techniques of producing uncanny effects is no longer referred to as “mastery” or “artfulness”, but as treason, betrayal, and deceitfulness, resulting in a general grudge that the reader experiences against both text and author. As an example of such treacherous authorship, the celebrated Hoffmann is replaced by Schnitzler to whom Freud famously had a more ambiguous relation. By this turn of Freud’s argumentation it becomes impossible to distinguish between the real and the aesthetic uncanny by means of their structure of appraisal as eliciting aesthetic pleasure in the first and real discomfort in the second case. Apparently, the fictional uncanny may create discomfort as well, given that the borders between likely reality and the improbable uncanny are not distinctly drawn. Recapitulating the cases of intellectual insecurity listed by Freud suggests, quite to the contrary, a strong continuity between uncanny feelings evoked by fantastic and real stimuli. Animism, witchcraft and magic, omnipotence of thought und unintended repetition, that is, all elements apart from the rather dated castration complex, share the characteristic that something appears to have an intentional source which, rationally viewed, can only be accidental. This characteristic also appears to be constitutive for the phenomenon of suppressed affects which are defined by an obscuration of their source; the only structural difference is that, in the later case, the origin has been known previously. The conjecture of an invisible magician or a person endowed with the evil look on the one hand, and the inexplicable and irresistible return of an affect on the other, result in a similar experience of no pleasure at all, the experience of one’s own impotence of reconstructing a systematic cohesion which is apparently given. What makes Hoffmann a good magician and Schnitzler an evil one, to remain with the metaphor, is the degree to which the reconstruction of their plan is possible for the reader (in this case, Freud). Hoffmann’s Nathanel, from the very beginning of the tale, moves within a grey area of infantile nightmare and (fictitious) reality, whereas Schnitzler gradually obscures the reality claims of his narration. The criterion of a discernible intention as a structural prevention of uncanny feelings can consequently not be used as a means of distinguishing between the real and the fantastic
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 57 uncanny, as Freud suggests, but much rather as a way of differentiating between unpleasant and pleasant uncanny feelings. The return of the same has to be intentional and recognisable as intentional in order to create pleasure, otherwise it creates discomfort. This distinction maintains its validity for both real and fantastic stimuli.
As long as a reconstructible rational cohesion can be assumed, that is, as long as the repetition can be explained as accidental or traced back to a conceivable intention, it is not uncanny: “Not everything that fulfils this condition – not everything that recalls repressed desires and surmounted modes of thinkingbelonging to the prehistory of the individual and of the race – is on that account uncanny.” (PS 268, SE 245). It is only the impression of a hidden structure that creates an uncanny discomfort that could be referred to as the opposite of the processual pleasure of cognitive fluency. The uncanny, therefore, cannot be divided into a real and an aesthetic emotion; rather, it is constituted by the insecurity of whether we are dealing with unstructured reality or intentionally motivated structures (that are not necessarily artefacts).
In order to evaluate the impact that including the uncanny may have on the debate surrounding aesthetic emotions, I will first have to introduce a constraint. As a paradigmatic case of repeated exposure to something familiar, the uncanny permits no conclusions to be drawn regarding the group of aesthetic preferences that Darwin has labelled “love of the new”. Neophilia as a phenomenon, as I have shown by inverting the hypotheses of mere exposure, prototypicality and cognitive fluency, cannot be analysed by means of approaches that primarily explain aesthetic pleasure by the familiarity of the stimulus. It is not the objective of this study to determine the extent to which encounters with the “new” can be goal relevant or goal congruent (for a sociobiological account of novelty or complexity as sources of aesthetic pleasure cf. Berlyne 1971, for a convincing attempt to describe confrontations with new and complex stimuli as “exhilaratingly challenging” cf. Armstrong/Detweiler-Bedell 2008). I suggest a categorical divide between aesthetic emotions based on repetition, familiarity and recognition on the one hand, and aesthetic emotions centred on the very unknown on the other. Contrary to Aristotle’s poetics and to the three psychological approaches outlined above, this constraint refers to the uncanny as well as to the general aesthetic effects of repetition: conclusions about aesthetic likes or dislikes produced by familiarity are not conclusions about all aesthetic emotions, but about one of two clearly distinguishable categories of these.
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 58 If the uncanny is an aesthetic emotion, we can state three assertions which problematise the interrelation between real and aesthetic emotions. According to Freud’s definition, the uncanny is a strong emotion of fear and discomfort that may be caused by either real or fantastic stimuli. The fact that it is described as a strong emotion implies, firstly, that a distinction between real and aesthetic emotions cannot rely on the criterion of material irrelevance (or “Dämpfung und Zielhemmung” as Freud has it), since the return of the repressed, at least if we maintain the emphatic psychoanalytic concept of repression, could not possibly be irrelevant. Freud’s examples do not invite such a classification, as they include border cases of human fear, such as being buried alive, being confronted with an exact doppelganger or facing unanimated matter suddenly coming to life. Within the vocabulary of appraisal theory, these objects of fear are highly relevant, highly goal obstructive and linked to a lack of coping potential; they are strong affects of fear. If the uncanny is an aesthetic emotion as Freud suggests, aesthetic emotions are not defined by irrelevance. Secondly, the uncanny suggests that aesthetic and real emotions cannot be distinguished by means of an evaluation of the stimulus’ status as an artefact. The predominant definition of aesthetic emotions in current psychological research (as “emotions evoked by artefacts”) requires a precise knowledge of what an artefact is, which, rather than being approached by humanities, is becoming increasingly out of reach. It also implies that aesthetic emotions can exclusively be derived from artefacts, which, even if we turn only to the simple examples of mathematical proves, attractive faces or sunsets, is by no means given. The uncanny describes a zone of indiscernibility between fact and fiction, reality and artifact. Its destabilising and upsetting potential relies on the very uncertainty of the correct appraisal of a stimulus as accidental (natural) or intentional (artificial). Thirdly, the uncanny as an aesthetic emotion does not permit the universalisation of the Aristotelian premise that repetition, familiarity, and recognition produce aesthetic pleasure. This universalisation frequently at work in psychological aesthetics is contradicted by the observation that such pleasure is only evoked when certain standards of intentionality and recognisability of intention are met. The uncanny is primarily a negative emotion, despite the fact that it is based on the familiarity of the stimulus – this affirms the Sylvia/Brown hypothesis according to which negative emotions generally “qualify” as aesthetic emotions. The uncanny can apparently be evaluated positively, as a welcome thrill in art reception, as well as negatively, as a threat to
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 59 one’s own well-being. The evaluation depends invariably on the degree to which the source of the stimulus is known.
Within the ongoing psychological debate, aesthetic emotions are defined either by stimulus (as emotions evoked by art) or by degree, by means of their intensity and relevance (as emotions with little consequences for existential goals). In either case, they are debated as occurrences parallel to real emotions; psychologists define as “aesthetic emotions” generally all emotions that occur in every day contexts, so that the question of genuinely aesthetic emotions is not asked. Furthermore, psychological attention is mostly directed at the formation of aesthetic pleasure and related positive affects which accounts for the “positivity bias” of its results. Introducing the uncanny into the category of aesthetic emotions allows both insights into genuinely aesthetic and genuinely negative aesthetic emotions. I have shown that Freud’s distinction between a real and a fantastic uncanny is doubtful in several of its implications, and I would like to reformulate these doubts into the hypothesis that an uncanny feeling that is a genuinely and exclusively “real” emotion does not comply with the definition of the term. Uncanny stimuli differ from beautiful ones insofar as they require a moment of insecurity about their artificiality. In two cases of source insight there is no uncanny emotion: if a stimulus can be classified as accidental, that is, following natural laws, or if it is caused by a recognisable instance. Only if this instance is invisible or appears to be missing but cannot be excluded as a cause of the event, is the uncanny produced, as is the case with a suppressed affect as well as with an invisible witch or magician. The insecurity of whether we are dealing with manipulated, structured and intentional design or mere chance accounts for the uncanny feeling, and it is by definition impossible to label the status of the stimulus as “real” or “aesthetic”.
As suggested by the models of mere exposure, prototypicality and cognitive fluency, the structure of repetition, familiarity and recognition provides a solid criterion for defining a large group of aesthetic emotions. However, the decisive moment for a positive or negative appraisal of the repetition process is whether the possibility is given to trace back what is repeated to a repetition rule. For a positive appraisal in the sense of aesthetic pleasure, it is necessary to recognise not only an object or process, but also the structure that conditions its repeated occurrence (or, as in several experiments, not to consciously notice at all that a repetition is taking place). Compared with the psychological conceptions sketched above, defining (one group of) aesthetic emotions by means of comprehensible vs. incomprehensible repetition
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 60 features the advantages that: (1) the positivity bias of the term aesthetic emotions is avoided in favour of an open process of appraisal which includes both pleasure and discomfort as possible results; (2) the problematic distinction between artistic and real stimuli is not needed; (3) by waiving the relevance criterion, strong emotions can be included; and (4) it becomes possible to discuss the specificity of aesthetic emotions, since they are not restricted to weakened analogies to real emotions.
Defining aesthetic emotions by repetitive structures implies that they are of secondary nature. However, they are not, as Lazarus suggests, mere copies of “real” emotions, but phenomena of transformation that differ structurally (and significantly so) from primary emotions. On the original sources of the uncanny, Freud clearly states that any emotion, “no matter which”, can be transformed into something uncanny by means of unintended return; my parallels to the Aristotelian double affect and conceptions of beauty in cognitive psychology suggest that this applies to the entire group of emotions. Accordingly, not all real emotions “qualify” as aesthetic emotions, an idea which would provide mere copies, but rather, any given primary affect can be transformed into an aesthetic emotion which may differ significantly from the primary emotion. The question of whether aesthetic emotions exist could be answered only by referring to all of them, which exceeds the scope of this paper by far; what we have gained by examining the uncanny is a strong definition of one group of emotions which may (or may not) be called aesthetic, but which definitely share a common structure. The example of the uncanny proves that there can be negative responses to repetitive stimuli – discomfort, and actually no pleasure at all – and that the distinction between irrelevant “aesthetic” and relevant “real” emotions depends on rather fragile evaluation processes.
In Freud’s essay, there is one more peculiarity to the distinction between real and fantastic uncanny that refers to psychoanalysis itself and has gone widely unnoticed. I have already shown how central the concept of the uncanny must be to psychoanalysis, contrary to Freud’s initial belittling. Unsuccessful suppression and the fear affect derived from it are at the core of psychoanalysis, and it is a safe assumption (even though it may be an odd phrasing) that psychoanalysis produces techniques to analyse uncanny phenomena, which is much along the lines of the traditional Freud readings linking psychoanalysis to its literary pretexts: something that should have remained hidden is brought out into the light. At the same time, the essay contains a remark that establishes another line of continuity between Romanticism and
Image & Narrative, Vol 11, No 3 (2010) 61 psychoanalysis, namely as techniques of producing uncanny feelings which are not easily classifiable either as aesthetic pleasure or as real fear, but which definitely contain a notion of magic. This remark is compatible with Freud’s tendency to engage in a form of self-demonisation that is not free of vanity (Lacan reports that Freud considered himself to be “bringing the pest” to America) and, again, reflects the ambivalence of the concept of the uncanny as a discomfort for the removal of which techniques must be designed, and as the product of artful pleasure techniques:
Indeed, I should not be surprised to hear that psychoanalysis, which is concerned with laying bare these hidden forces, has itself become uncanny to many people for that very reason. In one case, after I had succeeded – though not too rapidly – in effecting a cure in a girl who had been an invalid for many years, I myself heard this view expressed by the patient’s mother long after her recovery.” (PS 266, SE 244).
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Jan Niklas Howe has been working on a PhD thesis at the Friedrich Schlegel Graduate School of Literary Studies since 2008. His dissertation focuses on the banalisation and universalisation of monsters in nineteenth-century literature, medicine, psychiatry and early evolutionary theory. E-mail: jhowe@gmx.de
