Theory & Psychology

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Special Section: Rethinking Visual Pleasure: Aesthetics and Affect

Susan Best
Theory Psychology 2007; 17; 505
DOI: 10.1177/0959354307079295

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 SPECIAL SECTION

Rethinking Visual Pleasure

Aesthetics and Affect

Susan Best
UNIVERSITY OF NEW SOUTH WALES

ABSTRACT. My concern in this article is with how Silvan Tomkins’ theory of

affects might help us to think about the affective response to art. For my pur-
poses, there are two aspects of his account of affects that are particularly
useful. First, Tomkins does not presume that there is a proper object of
affect; hence the love of art is not automatically or necessarily about the
diversion of libido or the investment of libidinal energy. The second signif-
icant factor in Tomkins’ account of affects is the way in which he separates
and yet entwines the drives, affects and cognition. It is this model of the
embodied, feeling, thinking subject which promises to reach what most
people seek or expect from the experience of art.
KEY WORDS: aesthetics, art theory, interest and excitement, Tomkins

Perception is ex hypothesi a form of affection and being moved, and the

same goes for thinking and knowing. (Aristotle, c. 350 BC/1987, p. 150)
We are accustomed to thinking of art as a moving experience. Yet in current
art historical scholarship very little has been said about this responsive ‘move-
ment’ in the viewer. As any attentive observer of art history will know, ‘move-
ment’ is mainly attributed to the makers of modern art: ‘movements’ describes
the successive waves of artistic invention, not the changes wrought in the
accompanying generations of viewers. The viewer is not exactly rendered
impassive by this concentration on the production of art, but certainly the
viewer’s affective reaction is not currently central to our understanding of the
meaning of art, or to the experience of looking.
One might say that the emphasis on the cultural dimension of art has
precluded this line of investigation. In recent art history and criticism, the pri-
mary concern is the interpretation of art in terms of its cultural meaning or
socially communicative power, rather than with what might be seen as its less

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506 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 17(4)

thematizable psychical dimension. On the rare occasions when the psychical

dimensions of looking and visual pleasure have been investigated, art history
has followed feminist film theory and consequently desire and sexual differ-
ence have tended to dominate the discussion. The pleasure of art then
becomes a continuation of sexual domination by other means—we ask who
gets to look, not how or why we look. In art history, there is then no adequate
account of the simple fact of being moved, touched, engaged, call it what you
will, by a work of art.
My concern in this paper is with how Silvan Tomkins’ theory of affects
(Tomkins, 1962, 1963, 1991) might help us to think about this affective
response to art. For my purposes, there are two aspects of his account of affects
that are particularly useful. First, he does not presume that there is a proper
object of affect; hence the interest in art is not automatically or necessarily
about the diversion of libido or the investment of libidinal energy. In other
words, while the affective system is relatively fixed—there are nine and only
nine affects, and these are clearly anchored in the subject (‘hardwired into the
human biological system’, as Sedgwick and Frank [1995, p. 2] put it)—the
range of objects that elicit or provoke affect is not fixed or prescribed.
It could be argued that in this regard, Tomkins’ theory of affects emulates
Freud’s largely formal account of the drives, where the components of the
drive are specified—source, pressure, aim, object—but not their content,
hence the object of the drive is similarly unspecified. When it comes to art,
however, the picture is more complicated. According to Freud, the pleasure in
art is the result of a vicissitude of the drive—sublimation (Freud, 1929/1985,
pp. 268–73). Art serves first the artist, and then by proxy the viewer, as a sub-
stitute for wishes and pleasures forgone or forbidden.1 It is thus a shared cul-
tural consolation for giving up the more primary pleasures. In other words, art
allows the diminishment or abreaction of unpleasure arising from renuncia-
tion. What impels our interest in art is the unpleasure that arises elsewhere;
aesthetic pleasure thus takes place ultimately under the sway of the negative.
In regard to art, Tomkins’ theory of affects displaces the Freudian emphasis
on the drives as the controlling but silent partners in cultural life and, in the
case of art, this allows a more straightforward relationship between positive
affect and its object.
The second significant factor in Tomkins’ account of affects is the way in
which he separates and yet entwines the drives, affects and cognition. It is this
model of the embodied, feeling, thinking subject that promises to reach what
most people seek or expect from the experience of art.
First, I want to look at some of the reasons why affect has been so marginal
to the concerns of contemporary art history, then in the second part of this paper
I will be looking at the affect which best accounts for the capacity for deriving
pleasure from looking at art: the affect Tomkins calls interest–excitement.
Other affects Tomkins identifies might be equally useful for thinking about
the displeasure caused by art. Disgust and shock (Tomkins’ term is ‘startle’)

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BEST: RETHINKING VISUAL PLEASURE 507

are certainly affects that can be applied to much avant-garde art of the 20th
and 21st centuries. Tomkins’ account of shame (1963, pp. 118–156) would
also be extremely useful when thinking about the extreme displeasure caused
to some by controversial art involving explicit sexual acts, such as the work
of Robert Mapplethorpe. Indeed an extreme intolerance for shame may play
a major role in the censorship of such art. My concern in this article, however,
is with the pleasurable engagement with art not its repudiation.

The Shift Away from Affect

I would like to suggest that the lack of concern about affect in contemporary
art history is the direct consequence of what has been termed the anti-aes-
thetic impulse in modern art. A complex cluster of ideas can be investigated
under this heading ‘anti-aesthetic’: from the demise of beauty as the central
category of art-evaluation (19th-century Realism mortally wounds this guid-
ing precept), through to the critical ‘negations’ performed by modern art
movements bent on illuminating, attacking or unpicking the conventions and
protocols of visual representation (Foster, 1983, pp. xv–xvi). The result of
collecting these changes and critical interventions under the heading ‘anti-
aesthetic’ is that aesthetics, as Christine Battersby (1991, p. 35) has noted, is
now a much-maligned body of knowledge, particularly in feminist and left-
oriented approaches to art history and film theory. Nowhere is this rejection
of aesthetics more clearly illustrated than in Laura Mulvey’s classic essay of
1975, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, an article that has set the tone
and the terms of most feminist psychoanalytic approaches to visual culture.
Mulvey’s stated aim in this article was to destroy the visual pleasure that
derives from the fascination with the human form. In the process she sub-
stantially and irrevocably changed our understanding of visual pleasure. From
an innocent enough affect—the feeling of liking was the concern of Kant’s
aesthetics (Kant, 1790/1987, pp. 44–53)—visual pleasure became instead
something intimately tied to patriarchal ideology. Mulvey identifies two kinds
of viewing pleasure—identification and objectification—both of which pre-
sume, or conform to, an asymmetrical relation between the sexes. Women,
she argues, are usually objectified by mainstream realist cinema; visual pleas-
ure here derives from voyeuristically looking at the woman-as-spectacle.
Men, on the other hand, are the active figures with whom one should narcis-
sistically identify. Much has since been made of this gendered division of
roles into looked-at and bearer-of-the-look in both art history and film theory;
however, very little has been said about the subsequent loss of affect as a key
term of critical discussion.2
In the wake of Mulvey’s (1975) essay, visual pleasure has become highly
suspect, given its demonstrated complicity with voyeurism, narcissism and
the perpetuation of rigid gender roles. Mulvey’s intervention leaves us much

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508 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 17(4)

better informed about the sexual dynamics of looking, but also impoverished
when it comes to discussing visual pleasure. Her groundbreaking account is
so convincing that it seems to exclude the possibility of other modes of look-
ing or other sources of pleasure. But are narcissistic identification and
voyeuristic objectification really the only ways in which we experience pleas-
ure in looking? I will return to this question and Mulvey’s terms of analysis
in the next section.
This suspicion of aesthetics is not limited to psychoanalytical approaches
to culture; it can be seen in Brian Massumi’s recent introduction to a special
issue of the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature on Deleuze and
Guattari. He refers to the ‘embarrassed silence’ in literary and cultural theory
about terms such as expression, beauty and aesthetics (Massumi, 1997, p.
745). While Massumi is certainly part of a reappraisal of such terms via the
work of Deleuze, he nonetheless participates in the denigration of aesthetics
insofar as he represents traditional aesthetics and its concerns in highly cari-
catured form. For example, beauty, he states, calls up two equally unsavoury
poles: ‘the spontaneous outpourings of romantic individualism and the
tyranny of imposed judgments of taste’ (p. 745).
The first so-called ‘unsavoury pole’ is drawn from the Romantic tradition,
which privileged the investigation of the nature of artistic production, and the
role of the artist in that production, over the work and its reception.
Concentrating on the production of art or the nature of artistic expression,
however, does not mean that the artist’s work is seen as a spontaneous out-
pouring of personal feelings. Rather, the Romantic investigation of produc-
tion puts in place what Gyorgy Markus (1996, 2003) identifies as one of the
three key approaches to aesthetics. Markus divides German Idealist aesthet-
ics into three moments, each characterized by the central aesthetic problem
addressed: an aesthetics of reception (Kant), an aesthetics of production (Jena
Romanticism) and an aesthetics of the work (Hegel). Most aesthetic theory
can still be accommodated within this schema. The legacy of Jena
Romanticism, in particular, can best be discerned in the ongoing and rigorous
debates about the nature of expression in art, where the caricature of the
expressive artist that Massumi provides is nowhere in sight (see Casey, 1971,
pp. 197–207; Dufrenne, 1953/1973).
Massumi’s (1997) caricature of the Romantic tradition nonetheless does
have pertinence in popular culture. Films about artists often deploy this par-
ticular trope of the spontaneous or inspired creative individual. From the clas-
sic account of the life of painter Vincent Van Gogh, Lust for Life (Minnelli,
1956), through to more recent films about Jackson Pollock (Harris, 2000) or
Frida Kahlo (Taymor, 2002), the idea of art as a spontaneous outpouring of
the artist’s feelings continues to have popular currency. This particular
mythology about the artist, however, has very little purchase in either art his-
tory or aesthetics. More commonly, art history combines a concern with the
intentions of the artist with broader cultural and historical issues.

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BEST: RETHINKING VISUAL PLEASURE 509

The second pole that Massumi (1997) identifies is the concern with
judgements of taste, an approach most closely identified with Kantian aes-
thetics. While it is true that, for Kant (1790/1987, pp. 320–321), taste is the
ultimate arbiter of art, both the production and the reception of it, and to
some degree this taste presumes something like a cultural norm, this char-
acterization ignores the fact that taste is not just a cultural imposition, it is
also linked to spontaneous feeling. Indeed for Kant the viewer’s affective
response is central to the conception of art. For Kant (1790/1987, p. 54),
an aesthetic judgement is not, as we now think of it, primarily about
the appearance of the object judged; instead it concerns the sensation that
the subject experiences in relation to the representation of an object—the
assumption being that others should share this same feeling of pleasure.
Indeed, we act as if our response is universally shared, we presume others
will feel as we do: share our taste in the beautiful and our standards in
judging the sublime.
My point here is that aesthetics is not simply an embarrassment for cultural
theory; it contains some of the clues for rethinking the gaze, visual pleasure
and affective engagement with art. As the part of traditional philosophy that
originated in the attempt to confront what is not fully captured by reason, it
offers important insights into the domain of ‘non-reason’ that unfortunately
art history and cultural theory have forgotten or disavowed in their rush to be
interpretative disciplines dealing with clearly communicable knowledge. I
have resisted using the word ‘irrational’ here, as art is not simply the opposite
of rationality, it also operates within the domain of reason, as Kant very
clearly pointed out (1790/1987, pp. 159–162). For Kant, reason is certainly
evident in the will that makes art, but reason alone cannot fully account for
the products of that will.
Perhaps we can capture something of this uneasy positioning of art and the
aesthetic domain by following the familial analogy of Baumgarten, who
coined the term ‘aesthetics’. He proposed this new branch of philosophical
knowledge as the ‘sister’ of logic: ‘Science’, he said, ‘is not to be dragged
down to the region of sensibility, but the sensible is to be lifted to the dignity
of knowledge’ (as cited in Eagleton, 1990, p. 17). It is, then, in this newly
dignified region of sensibility that I want to situate Tomkins’ work.

Reintroducing Affect: Interest–Excitement and the Pleasure of

Communion

Interest–excitement is the first affect that Tomkins (1962) discusses. It is, he

states, more primary than the drives; to have sexual interest one must first
have interest per se. Further, interest is the basis for cognition; without inter-
est, the work of thought has no propeller; the inner world of thought needs the
propulsion of interest. In sum, without the fertile soil of interest, he suggests,

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510 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 17(4)

nothing else can develop. It is, then, the primary mechanism for orientation
and embedment in the world and holds the possibility of engagement with it.
Considering interest as an affect is Tomkins’ innovation, his key addition to
Darwin’s categorization of the emotions (Darwin, 1872/1965). Tomkins, like
Darwin, assumes that affects are innate and that they have distinct facial
expression. What concerns Tomkins, however, are the ways in which affects,
such as interest, are elaborated in life. For example, he traces what interest
makes possible or how it might be inhibited, thereby producing a highly
nuanced picture of how interest, or its diminution, shapes particular kinds of
personalities and their pleasures. Tomkins (1962) refers in passing to the
importance of interest in becoming acquainted with a painting, a person, an
idea and the self. He does not differentiate here between these objects of
interest or suggest any is more worthy or primary; as he says, ‘any affect may
have any “object” ’ (p. 347).
Naturally enough, given this characterization, interest–excitement is involved
with learning and oriented towards novelty. If we think of it in Kantian terms we
might think of it as a kind of liking, but a liking not so much for the familiarity
and comfort of beauty—the domain of joy encompasses the familiar, which
entails the reduction of interest. Interest is a liking for the challenge of the unfa-
miliar. It is thus about a kind of psychic stretching, perhaps even a restlessness
about things as they are, things known. This, then, is the demeanour that would
orient one to the on-going challenges of modern or contemporary art; it is like
the opening that allows other affects, feelings, sensations and emotions to stream
in or to flow out. It is, then, the precondition of what most people would regard
as the pinnacle of aesthetic experience, being affected or moved.
Positing interest–excitement as the root cause of aesthetic pleasure may just
seem like a very common-sense proposition: if you are not interested in art
(modern or otherwise), it is highly unlikely that it will deliver a moving expe-
rience. But rooting aesthetic pleasure in the affective system, rather than the
drives, has quite profound consequences for how we view art. First, art ceases
to be merely a consolation or compensation for forgoing sexual pleasure.
When pleasure in art is seen as the result of sublimating the sexual drive, it
becomes a more socially accepted substitute for the sexual drive and thus is
aligned with the demands of culture. While sublimation may account for inter-
est in great masterpieces of the past that are unassailably part of high culture,
the alignment of art with a kind of conservative, normalizing culture is much
less available to the viewer of contemporary art, who is never sure of the
significance or place of the art they are viewing. In other words, novelty, which
is a crucial feature of modern art, is addressed to the affect of interest–
excitement, not the renunciative demands of culture served by sublimation.
If interest–excitement is only a precondition for pleasure in art, then how do
we account for what happens next? The further openness to an art object that
might be called empathy, attunement or, to return to a more psychoanalytic
vocabulary for the moment, identification is then needed to think about what

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BEST: RETHINKING VISUAL PLEASURE 511

occurs when interest is activated and the experience goes beyond the some-
what tepid feeling of liking.
Identification with objects, such as art objects, is certainly a strange thing.
It is not exactly communion or mutuality, what Tomkins (1962) characterizes
as the enclosing circuit of claustral joy (pp. 419–422). But there is something
in the interpolation by art, coupled with its expressivity, that calls for some-
thing like communion. The bodily aspect of responding to aesthetic expression
might be explored via the work of Merleau-Ponty (see Best, 1999, pp.
172–177). The activation of affect here proceeds from a bodily encounter, the
trigger of which in the first instance, and often forever after, remains just below
the threshold of consciousness. While this encounter is not strictly speaking
intersubjective, the sense of the work ‘provoking’ a response requires some-
thing akin to and yet different from the subject-to-subject encounter.
In object relations theory, this space of communion is aligned with play. Art
revokes the liminal world of the infant: as Winnicott puts it, art is the ‘adult
equivalent of the transitional phenomena of infancy and early childhood’ (cited
in Kuspit, 1996, p. 286). Art is here ambiguously positioned on the cusp of the
inner subjective world and the outer objective world. Such a positioning of art
is not incompatible with the elicitation of interest–excitement; however, align-
ing art with the negotiation of the subject’s boundaries in this way may be at
the expense of art’s confronting otherness. Certainly, the equation between art
and play applies to works of art that operate in a soothing way. It matches, for
example, Henri Matisse’s famous claim that he wanted his art to be like an
armchair for the tired businessman (Matisse, 1908/1968, p. 135). However,
with very confronting or difficult work, work that cannot be easily or immedi-
ately assimilated, this liminal position of quasi-incorporation is less available.
It is perhaps by returning to the terms of Mulvey’s (1975) argument, if not
its premise, that we might be able to think about the communion that interest
in the work of art makes possible. I would argue that some of the most inter-
esting modern works of art activate the push–pull of objectification–identifi-
cation. Now, this may sound rather like the liminal space of the transitional
object: identification suggests some capacity to incorporate the experience of
the object while objectification suggests a distancing from the object, an
awareness of its difference from us. Or, to put this another way, such works of
art may draw us in (engage us, move us, so to speak), in a manner not unlike
identification, and yet there is an insistent otherness that refuses merger—the
work has an objecthood that asserts itself. Rather than seeing this as analogous
to play or as a negotiation of the subject’s limits, the two contrary forces could
be seen as producing a kind of suspension between these two states.
This suspended state between objectification and identification could be
described as a kind of ‘syncope’. Catherine Clément (1990/1994, pp. 1–21)
uses this term to describe the pauses or breaths that suspend masterful being.
These suspensions stretch from the everyday cough to fainting and rapture.
They are ambiguous states of being, or non-being, associated with the absence

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512 THEORY & PSYCHOLOGY 17(4)

of self. Clément tries to recapture some sense of the positivity of absence of

self by suggesting that the subject who comes to after fainting should ask:
‘Where was I?’ instead of ‘Where am I?’ (p. 1). The experience of rapture is
thus not simply aligned with the death or liquidation of the subject; it is the
transportation of being, or the momentary suspension of masterful being.
This suspended state might describe the conditions for communion with
the modern and contemporary work of art, that is, there is proximity—we are
drawn in—but there is also a distance; disinterest, to use Kant’s terms: we are
pushed out and hence there is the safety of aesthetic distance versus the per-
ils of the face-to-face encounter (Kant, 1790/1987, p. 46). To recast this in
Tomkins’ terms (1962, pp. 352–362), the primacy of interest recognizes the
otherness and novelty of the object, while joy works to bring the object into
communion with the subject. Interest thus underscores the separation of sub-
ject and object and thereby facilitates a kind of joyous communion that avoids
the mastery that might be evoked by some conceptions of play (I’m thinking
here of the mastery of the object implicit in Freud’s [1920/1984b] account of
the Fort–Da game).3
The suspended state that this produces is not, then, entirely about the sub-
ject, as Clément (1990/1994) so insightfully observes. It fosters a level of
self-forgetfulness akin to reverie. We might conclude that the capacity to hold
in tension contradictions—for example identification/objectification—such
that both ‘pulls’ are equally felt may well represent one of the key structures
of aesthetic experience in the late 20th century and the early 21st century. The
suspense of syncope is thus not the absence of aesthetic affect, but rather the
space of its fullest expansion. In this expansion or unfolding we may find the
space to speak, once again, of visual pleasure.

Notes
1. Sublimation is an undeveloped part of Freud’s theory. James Strachey notes in an
editorial footnote that there may have been a paper directly on sublimation which
was lost or destroyed (Strachey in Freud, 1915/1984a, p. 123, fn. 4).
2. Innumerable writers have extended the literature on the gaze. See, for example,
Mulvey’s further comments (Mulvey, 1981, pp. 12–15). See also Copjec (1995,
pp. 15–38), Doane (1987), Pollock (1988) and Silverman (1996).
3. In Freud’s description of his grandson’s exploratory game with a cotton-reel,
called the Fort–Da game, the child repeatedly throws and retrieves a wooden reel
with a string attached, thereby mimicking (and attempting to master via significa-
tion) the presence and absence of the mother. See Freud’s account of the Fort–Da
game in Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud, 1920/1984b, pp. 283–287).

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SUSAN BEST is a Senior Lecturer in Art History and Theory at the University
of New South Wales. Her recent work is on the applications of psycho-
analysis and, in particular, theories of affect to the analysis of modern and
contemporary art. ADDRESS: Art History and Theory, University of New
South Wales, PO Box 259, Paddington NSW 2021, Australia. [email:
s.best@unsw.edu.au]

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