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 GEN
DER
A ND
RELAT
ABILIT
Y IN

D IG
ITAL C
ULTU
RE
MA
NA
GIN
G AFF
ECT, IN
TIMA
CY
AN
D VAL
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AKAN
E KAN
AI
Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture
 Akane Kanai

Gender and
Relatability in Digital
Culture
Managing Affect, Intimacy and Value
Akane Kanai
School of Media, Film and Journalism
Monash University
Caulfield, VIC, Australia

ISBN 978-3-319-91514-2 ISBN 978-3-319-91515-9 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91515-9

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018947409

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2019

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
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 Acknowledgements

I would like to thank a number of people for their support and kind-
ness in helping this book come to fruition. My first thank you goes
to the bloggers who allowed me to use their blogs as the basis for my
research and who made this research possible. A huge thank you to Amy
Shields Dobson and JaneMaree Maher, for their professionalism and
care in mentoring me through the research process. I want to also thank
Amy for her continued openness and patience as we continue to collab-
orate on new projects!
My thanks go to my colleagues at the University of Newcastle where
I found my first lecturing job after my Ph.D. They have not only
shaped my thinking but were supportive in the everyday ways that
make it much easier to embark on the process of writing your first
book. To my colleagues in Sociology and Anthropology: Lisa Adkins,
Caragh Brosnan, Ann Taylor; and particularly the Youth Studies group:
Julia Coffey, David Farrugia, Joel McGregor, Pam Nilan, Elianne
Renaud, Megan Sharp, Steve Threadgold; thank you for making a fan-
tastic collegial and intellectual space to work in.
Thanks also to Lisa Adkins and to Maryanne Dever at UTS for their
guidance during my participation in the Australian Feminist Studies

v
vi   Acknowledgements

mentorship programme. I am also immensely grateful to Ros Gill at

City University. Not only has her scholarship been foundational to the
intellectual labour of this book, her encouragement and support of me
has also given me the kind of assurance necessary for developing my
ideas as an early career scholar.
I am fortunate to be surrounded by fantastic new colleagues at
Monash University in the School of Media, Film, and Journalism, but
I really want to acknowledge my old Monash Ph.D. friends: Earvin
Cabalquinto, Karla Elliott, Nicholas Hill, Bernice Loh, and Cathy
Waite, who have all read chapters of this book.
Once you get going with acknowledgements, it’s hard to know where
to stop. I will just mention a few more people. Thank you to all my
friends outside the academy with whom I have enjoyed much ‘wine
time’ as well as intellectual discussion. You have fundamentally shaped
my work. A heartfelt thank you to my partner, Ben, who has always
supported me throughout the research process, from printing things
at his workplace for me, to moving states twice for me. And finally,
to my family, particularly my mum, Yumiko Kanai, who kept her
maiden name and passed it on to me. Thank you for sparking my
interest in gender, power, recognisability and representability from the
very beginning.

Some sections in Chapter 4 draw on material published in Feminist

Media Studies, in the article ‘The best friend, Other girls, hot guys,
creeps and boyfriends: The relational production of self on Tumblr’.
Feminist Media Studies, (2017) 17(6), 911–925. https://doi.org/10.108
0/14680777.2017.1298647.
Some paragraphs in Chapter 5 were initially published in the article
‘Girlfriendship and sameness: Affective belonging in a digital intimate
public.’ Journal of Gender Studies, 26(3), 293–306. https://doi.org/10.1
080/09589236.2017.1281108.
Chapter 6 redevelops some ideas initially published in the article
‘Beyond repudiation: The affective instrumentalisation of feminism in
girlfriendly spaces.’ Australian Feminist Studies (2017) 32(93), 240–258.
https://doi.org/10.1080/08164649.2017.1407641.
 Contents

1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate

Cultures and Neoliberalism 1

2 Managing Relatability: Feeling Rules and the Practice

of Moderation 29

3 The Classificatory Reader: Relating to Others Through

Digital Texts 61

4 Intimacy and Value: Telling the Self Through Figures 93

5 The Practices and Politics of a Relatable Brand 125

6 Relatability, Feminism, and the Shifting Sexual Contract 155

7 Ambivalence and Attachment: Some Final Reflections 179

Index 191

vii
 Abbreviations

GIF Graphics Interchange Format (bitmap Figure format)

The WSWCM public The WhatShouldWeCallMe public
WSBCM WhatShouldBetchesCallMe
WSWCM WhatShouldWeCallMe

ix
 List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Juice makes me happy. WSWCM 34

Fig. 2.2 Too many hot guys. WSBCM 37
Fig. 2.3 WhatShouldWeCallMe girlfriend header 44
Fig. 2.4 Sunday, also any other day. 2ndhandembarrassment 51
Fig. 3.1 Unsolicited advice on my love life. WSWCM 74
Fig. 3.2 Walking and listening to my iPod. WSWCM 82
Fig. 3.3 Waisis. TwoDumbGirls 83
Fig. 4.1 Scrub at law school. WSWCM 101
Fig. 4.2 No hook ups all weekend. WSBCM 109
Fig. 5.1 The most attractive betches. WSBCM 132
Fig. 5.2 What day is R? 2ndhandembarrassment 134
Fig. 5.3 Minimalist theme. TwoDumbGirls,
WhatShouldWeCollegeMe 143
Fig. 5.4 WhatShouldWeCallMe girlfriend header 143
Fig. 6.1 The time my boyfriend had my back. Pitchin’ Hissy Fits 168

xi
 1
Do You Relate to This? Femininity,
Affective Intimate Cultures
and Neoliberalism

Picture this. It was a not so sunny afternoon in early 2012. I was a

postgraduate student in my mid-20s living in London. It was cold, so
I was in my bedroom, killing time on Facebook. As I was scrolling,
I paused on a funny looking internet thing on my friend, Sophie’s,
Facebook page. I clicked on the link and was transported to a different
page. There, I saw a GIF of a cat perched precariously on a slim card-
board box, slowly but surely toppling over. The GIF was paired with the
caption, ‘when I’m drunk and trying to put on heels while standing’.1
The GIF was extracted from a YouTube video entitled ‘Many too
small boxes and Maru’ (Mugumogu 2010), where Maru, a famous
internet cat, insistently attempts to squeeze into boxes that are too small
for him. It had been reposted from Tumblr, the platform where it was
hosted, to my friend Sophie’s Facebook page. In posting this to Sophie’s
page, Sophie’s friend had written ‘Look who it is’ as an accompanying
comment, to which Sophie had responded, ‘If only I looked as cute as
Maru doing anything’. Evidently, Maru stood in for Sophie—but also
for a number of indefinite others who may have experienced similar dif-
ficulties in keeping upright while tipsy in party shoes.

© The Author(s) 2019 1

A. Kanai, Gender and Relatability in Digital Culture,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91515-9_1
2   A. Kanai

I laughed as the GIF, in its looping motion, kept on repeating

Maru’s toppling action. I was delighted at this funny re-interpreta-
tion of the slightly inebriated self as Maru, the cute, stubborn inter-
net cat. But I was also intrigued. I went to the blog that had created
this affective moment and began scrolling through the dozens of other
such posts they had created. I was fascinated by the way that an invi-
tation to mutual recognition was enacted through the blog on a num-
ber of levels. The blog neither named its authors nor provided any
images of them; its listed pseudonym was ‘wswcm’, the acronym for
‘WhatShouldWeCallMe’, the name of the blog. However, when further
browsing the contents of the blog, the punchy, funny mode of narra-
tion felt feminine, beyond the signifiers in the posts such as ‘heels’, ‘best
friends’ and discussion of dieting attempts. Both Sophie’s friend and
Sophie had read this post authored by a stranger as personally applica-
ble. I had read it in the context of Sophie’s Facebook page and in line
with her friend’s comment, had imagined the moment as pertaining
to her. But I had simultaneously recognised the moment as potentially
applicable for me and for others. This post was voiced as personal, relat-
ing to its author, but also generalisable to other readers’ experiences who
shared a similar socio-cultural, gendered and classed position in accept-
ing the invitation to relate to this moment.
Effectively, the post was an inside joke. Indeed, it came from a blog
authored by two long distance ‘best friends’, young female law stu-
dents living on opposite coasts of the United States, who used it to
send humorous GIFs to each other (Casserly 2012). Yet, others like
me had read their way into the joke through mobilising a shared social
imaginary mixing heels, booze, disorientation and laughter. The post
invited reading as an affective practice, understanding the post as an
articulation of someone else’s experience, whilst also recognising it as
one’s own. Further, the popularity of the blog spoke to a shared imag-
inary of a sizeable feminine audience. In early 2012, it went from 500
followers in its first week to 50,000 followers within its first month on
Tumblr (Casserly 2012). A few months after inception, it was attract-
ing up to 1.5 million views per day (Eckerle 2012), and media cov-
erage by Forbes (Casserly 2012) and Allure magazines (O’Neill 2012),
amongst others.
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
3

I subsequently discovered WhatShouldWeCallMe (‘WSWCM’ or

‘the founder blog’) had evidently inspired other readers on Tumblr, who
had created similar GIF-based visual blogs to relate moments of their
lives. Some explicitly stated they were a ‘takeoff’ of WSWCM; in oth-
ers, this connection was only implied. There was a visible and knowing
form of feminine connection displayed through these ‘follower’ blogs
(Shifman 2014): a commonality of identity leavened with a degree of
variation. Indeed, far from the narcissism often alleged in relation to
young women’s social media production (Tanner et al. 2013), this pro-
cess of adaptation and re-interpretation was suggestive of desires to
enact belonging through creating a shared space based around knowl-
edges and feelings deemed to be ‘common’ or even the ‘same’ for
unknown audiences. In the feminist cultural studies tradition, the fol-
lower blogs inspired by the founder blog might be seen as active audi-
ence texts. They engage with the gendered expectations (Thumim 2012)
presumed to be ‘common’ that are cited by WSWCM. They re-inter-
pret the significance of the founder blog in their articulation of shared
understandings of how youthful femininity is negotiated, adapted and
performed.
I was curious about this invitation premised on shared experience
and how I, myself, was able to feel this affinity with the blogs. What
was underpinning these pleasures in imagining the self as the ‘same’ as
others—in finding these posts ‘relatable’? And what kind of work had
gone into producing this relatability? It is, indeed, my own interpella-
tion by these blogs, as well the nagging feeling that there was more than
met the eye in their highly ‘hyperconscious’ (Rault 2017), self-deprecat-
ing and reassuring humour—that has led to me to ask questions about
the structures and politics of such relatability, and the ordering of femi-
nine subjectivities through them as part of broader shifts in subjectivity
in neoliberal culture.
Others have written on the management of relatability or related
topics in digital spaces—for example, Kristine Ask and Crystal Abidin
(2018) have written on relatability in relation to depression memes cir-
culated by students, and Camilla Vásquez and Samantha Creel (2017)
have explored similar forms of conviviality in discussing popular ‘chats’
on Tumblr. For the purposes of this book, I understand relatability as
4   A. Kanai

an affective relation (Pedwell 2014) produced through labour that

reflects a desirable notion of common experience to an unknown audi-
ence. Attaining relatability requires the ability to produce an account
of personal experience that assumes generality, and plausibly but pleas-
ingly reflects this audience’s experience in particular ways. In the fem-
inine digital culture I discuss, relatability is a sense of shared promise
positioning both blogger and reader, not as perfect, but buoyed by a
sense of common desire to remain in a nebulous zone of proximity to it.
As such, while the praise of relatability as a personality trait is, in a
way, a critique of standards of feminine perfection, it is still indelibly
attached to such standards as a central means of measuring the self, pro-
viding a pleasurable sense that others, too, are striving to ‘get by’ accord-
ing to them.
In this book, I examine how femininities are affectively produced via
the digital circulation of the founder blog I have mentioned, as well as
five follower blogs also hosted on Tumblr that provided me with per-
mission to analyse their blogs and reproduce their content: Secondhand
Embarrassment; WhatShouldBetchesCallMe; Pitchin’ Hissy Fits; Two
Dumb Girls; and WhatShouldWeCollegeMe. I draw mainly on analysis
of the content of the blogs, but also some information based on corre-
spondence with the bloggers. One of the creators of the follower blogs
also kindly agreed to an interview, and provided many insights that
I primarily draw on in Chapters 3 and 5. While all of these blogs situ-
ated on Tumblr, half of them also promoted their blog through other
platforms such as Twitter, while their content can be found recirculated
on Pinterest. The founder blog, as noted above, also attracted a signif-
icant amount of press. Accordingly, I am interested in the way these
femininities project a utopia of sameness in ways that are not confined
to Tumblr but are seen in media cultures more broadly.
In considering how such affective circulations secure investment in
uneven modes of belonging, I examine the techniques through which
the self is mediated, produced and disaggregated into general, shareable
experiences through these Tumblr blogs. In privileging gender as funda-
mental to these questions, this book draws centrally on Lauren Berlant’s
(2008) conceptualisation of intimate publics. Berlant (2008) argues that
‘women’s culture’ was one of the first mass-mediated intimate publics
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
5

in the United States, produced through the circulation of writing

of bourgeois white women that created a sense of place for them that
purported to be for all women. An intimate public is a culture of cir-
culation of ‘texts and things’ that purport to express participants’ ‘core
interests and desires’, producing a sense of commonality and shared his-
tory from these ongoing attachments (Berlant 2008, 5). As such, the
reliance of women’s culture on the emotional sameness of women prem-
ised on a common historical situation remains a ‘fantasy of generality’
(Berlant 2008, 6) that can only deliver for some. Fostering a ‘cruel opti-
mism’ (Berlant 2011), such intimate spaces tether marginalised people
to the conditions that continue to prevent their flourishing. And yet,
for the (white) women it addresses, as a space organised by the pleasures
of compassionate liberalism, Berlant suggests, such a space feels ‘ethical’,
providing a sense of continuity with the struggles and attachments of
others who have also been trivialised and devalued.
Berlant’s (2008) emphasis on the simultaneously normative and pub-
lic elements of intimacy, is but one line of thought that has shaped work
on mediated intimate publics (Petersen et al. 2018). The other line of
thought developing the work of Ken Plummer (2003), emphasises the
contemporary context of individualisation and choice in evolution from
traditional bounded intimacies (Petersen et al. 2018). This trajectory
also demonstrates parallels in the sociological work of Bauman (2003)
on liquid love and Giddens’ (1991) notion of the pure relationship. This
book’s location in feminist understandings of intimacy adopts Berlant’s
framework, without eschewing contemporary discourses of individual-
ity and autonomy. Rather, in line with feminist media scholarship that
stresses the work of emotional management (Hochschild 1983), the
book focuses on the way in which the very disciplinary and regulatory
injunctions to individuality and choice can often require the production
of intimacy, presence and sociability as its outcome.
Following Berlant’s insights, this book characterises the founder blog,
the follower blogs, their readership and circulation as a digital intimate
public, a digital space operating on a fantasy of fitting into a feminine
generality, offering a sense of ongoing attachment through the expres-
sion of emotional likeness. I term this public the ‘WSWCM pub-
lic’. The notion of an intimate public is useful, I suggest, in thinking
6   A. Kanai

through the structure of affective relationality for its participants. Far

from simply being a transparent, neutral field where certain ‘messages’
are expressed and conveyed, digital social spaces can be seen as social
terrain where certain truths, fantasies and investments are facilitated
and played out. Here, it is the promise of belonging, and of a norma-
tive commonality with certain affective subjects, facilitated through the
Tumblr’s cultures of circulation, that structure the pleasures of partici-
pating in this public.
This premise/promise of normative sameness with certain femi-
nine others is enacted through what I term ‘spectatorial girlfriendship’.
Spectatorial girlfriendship is the premise of ‘girlfriend readership’ of the
blogs, the expectation of shared knowledge of feminine popular culture,
rules, conduct and sociality upon which feelings of relatability depend.
It also refers, as I explore further in Chapter 3, to how individuals are
invited to look at the representations that circulate in the participatory
visual culture of the blogs, in which a particular spectatorial position
is normatively adopted as the ‘relational premise’ (Dobson 2014, 156)
of digital participation. Spectatorial girlfriendship provides a pleasura-
ble point of connection with other imagined (and real) readers of the
blogs in circulation, based on the idea that one is potentially the same as
other young women in processing the posts. Here I draw significantly
on Alison Winch’s (2013) analysis of girlfriend culture. Winch argues
that media play a central role in providing spaces of disciplinary homo-
social intimacy for women: ‘girlfriend’ spaces, in which women’s knowl-
edges of femininity and associated burdens of regulation are privileged.
However, Winch suggests that through the intertwining of affects such
as cruelty with affection, lovingness and meanness, such girlfriend cul-
ture tends to discipline women into a normative sameness premised on
dominant classed, raced and (hetero)sexualised forms of representabil-
ity. The affective framework of this intimate public promises a desirable
sameness—a relatability—that feels as though it closes down distances
between women, while projecting a possibility of being more proximate
to a girlfriend norm in which whiteness and middle class belonging is,
as Beech (2017) puts it, an absent-present discourse, invisible yet struc-
turing the relations in the public. The affective pull of this commonality
is one of the central ideas I explore through spectatorial girlfriendship as
a premise of a shared situation in social knowledges.
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
7

Drawing on these scholars’ attentiveness to the fantasies, privileges

and pleasures of commonality, I extend this framework to foreground
the affective labour and techniques of self-management deployed by the
participants in this public in achieving relatability. In short, I examine
not only what is offered but what is required and constrained in these
digital structures of participation. The WSWCM public operates on
the premise that, like the mediated selves distributed through the blogs,
spectatorial girlfriend readers are similarly invested of capacities to dis-
til, generalise, and pleasingly simplify the self. As such, identity here is
work. Following what Hochschild (1983) has famously termed ‘feeling
rules’, the self must be modulated, moderated, and managed in order
to deliver satisfying and relatable moments within particular gendered
terms. Such feeling rules and the labour they mandate may be situ-
ated as part of intensifying expectations of young women to seamlessly
thrive in a post-Fordist economies in which distinctions between public
and private, work and leisure are continually erased. In such an envi-
ronment, all experiences and relations may constitute a form of human
capital (Adkins 2016); thus, all moments, even and particularly those
where one fails to manage putting on heels while inebriated, may still
constitute opportunities to tell the self within narrow terms of value.

Neoliberal Femininities: Gender, Labour

and Feeling
Because of my focus on the labour of producing identity through
mediated affect, it is not possible to discuss youthful femininity in
this present moment without having regard to the neoliberal condi-
tions which reorganise and transform practicable forms of subjectivity.
From ‘girl power’ (Gonick 2006; Harris 2004) to ‘postfeminism’ (Gill
2007; McRobbie 2009, 2011; Tasker and Negra 2007) and even ‘post-
girl power’ (Dobson and Harris 2015; Gonick et al. 2009), feminist
media scholars have foregrounded neoliberalism as a key driving force
in the promotion of feminine subjectivities based on alignment and fit
within its agentic parameters. As Ros Gill and Akane Kanai (2018) have
argued elsewhere, media plays a central role in promulgating affective
8   A. Kanai

attachments to the type of entrepreneurial subjectivity demanded under

neoliberalism, portraying it as freely chosen and doable. The ideal sub-
jects of the entrepreneur and the independent contractor ‘invest in their
own human capital, contract out their own labour and take on the risks
and cost of such investments and of contracting themselves, as well of
the risks and costs of their whole lives and life-times ’ (Adkins 2016, 2;
my italics). Following Turner’s (2004) observation of media’s increasing
arrogation of previously state-based forms of authority in the manage-
ment of social identities, media should be understood as a key site of
processes through which femininity is shaped, governed and negotiated.
Accordingly, across diverse genres and spaces of production of neoliberal
media culture, scholars have argued the myth of the authentic individ-
ual and their ability to manage their life trajectory remains central (see,
e.g. Banet-Weiser 2012; Hamad 2014; Hearn 2006; Marshall 2010;
Nunn and Biressi 2010). In the wake of the structural ‘gap’ left by the
detraditionalisation and fragmentation of traditional social structures
noted by Beck (1992) and Bauman (2001), and the highly interven-
tionist and productive nature of neoliberalism as a form of governmen-
tality (Ong 2006), these mediated forms and spaces provide techniques
of monitoring, evaluation and adaptation through which individuals
may govern themselves. Yet, as McRobbie (2009) and Adkins (2003)
point out, for women, such a cognitive view of ‘critical’ reflexivity
where individuals self-evaluate, strategise and transform must be con-
textualised not necessarily in relation to gender detraditionalisation, but
the adaptation to the conditions of capital accumulation in neoliberal
culture.
Tansel (2017) suggests that it is important to have reference to neo-
liberalism as a contingent response to ongoing crises in capitalist pro-
duction, more than simply a ‘theory’ that the market must operate in
all domains of life (see, e.g. Harvey 2007). By understanding neoliber-
alism as a contingent response to crisis, we may observe a response not
only to problems of capital accumulation, but also to crises in identity
and citizenship. As such, the incorporation, accommodation and man-
agement of feminism and other identity-based social movements may
be seen as one element of this response, tethering social change to the
requirements of capital. McRobbie’s (2009) well known articulation of
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
9

the ‘post-feminist sexual contract’, and now the dispositif of ‘the per-
fect’ (2015), reveals the intensive and extensive governmental address to
young women as subjects of capacity in neoliberal times. In a double
movement, this ‘bargain’ retrenches gender through discourses of equal-
ity of opportunity and the promise of merit-based social change. In lieu
of the reorganisation of state, economy, and society around feminist
demands for social change, it is now young women—‘top girls’—who
become figures standing in for equality and progress in post-indus-
trial Western societies. Desirable, girlish, yet empowered all at once,
McRobbie (2009) notes the top girl is lauded for both her productive
and reproductive economic capacities. The top girl demonstrates the
intensified imperatives on young women to individually resolve exist-
ing social contradictions and inequalities as ‘pleasingly, lively, capable’
wage-earning subjects while ‘leaving feminism behind’ (McRobbie
2007, 722), demanding both entrepreneurship as well as a girlish
approachability. As such, the modulation of feeling demanded by this
sexual contract does double duty: it attests to the continuing stability
of gender while transforming women into ideal workers who are able to
traverse the traditional divide of domestic and public spheres.
The production of neoliberal ‘public service’ media (Ouellette and
Hay 2008) is exemplified in reality and lifestyle television, as well as
in celebrity as a genre of representation (Turner 2010), holding out
self-transformation through discerning planning and labour as both
fantasy and do-able practice. Such a sensibility is reiterated through
digital practices of branding (Banet-Weiser 2012) in which girls and
young women feature prominently. Work by Attwood (2011) and Senft
(2008) illustrates how young women have been pioneers in understand-
ing digital media as an affording mechanism that transforms personal
life and emotion work (Hochschild 1983/2003) into something that
may be distributed for consumption by unknown others. In contem-
porary digital life, we may observe that young women in influencer,
lifestyle and micro-celebrity work are labouring to produce a seamless
account of the self to digital audiences in which the intimate and the
commercial are deeply entwined (Abidin and Thompson 2012; Banet-
Weiser 2011; Berryman and Kavka 2017; Duffy and Hund 2015;
Winch 2013). These claims are echoed in media culture that proclaims
10   A. Kanai

a ‘post-race’ sensibility (Kennedy et al. 2005; Nakamura 2008), in

which race becomes a property of the self, a ‘flava’ (Banet-Weiser 2007)
that may be freely alienated, sold and consumed. In the proliferation of
neoliberal consumer culture that operates on the freedom of each con-
sumer citizen to tailor, improve and aestheticise their life (Banet-Weiser
2012), we see a corresponding blindness to the continuing materialities
and impoverishments of class-based inequalities. Indeed, as Tasker and
Negra (2007, 2014) note, neoliberal media culture places an empha-
sis on the attainment of luxury in way that makes it appear ordinary,
accessible, and practicable for all, but particularly for the enterprising
(female) consumer.
Despite the relative poverty of women in relation to men, particu-
larly for those who suffer classed, raced and geopolitical inequalities,
girls and young women continue to figure as ideal consumer-entrepre-
neurs both in Western feminine cultures as well as transnationally, unit-
ing the production of desire and positive affects with brands and other
consumer goods (Abidin and Thompson 2012; Dosekun 2015; Loh
2016; McRobbie 2009, 2011). While Negra (2008) comments largely
on lifestyle and reality television, such an emphasis on the ‘doability’
of luxury can be seen to be intensified in the contemporary circulation
of aestheticized public and domestic lives in commercial digital media
cultures like Instagram (Marwick 2015) and the online craft economy
(Luckman 2015). This heightened mediated emphasis on a DIY (gov-
ern)mentality takes on further significance in a context of the simulta-
neous deterioration of conditions of employment, the endless deferral of
reward (Adkins 2016), and the intensified requirements to perform of
all kinds of labour: affective, im/material, reproductive and productive.
In making these arguments in relation to the entrepreneurial subjectivi-
ties promulgated by neoliberal media culture, I stress that I am not sug-
gesting that neoliberalism is ‘hands off’. I discuss these movements to
foreground the affective glue that secures certain attachments to neolib-
eral life.
It is vital to recognise that it is through the affective register that
young women are enjoined to manage and resolve neoliberalism’s con-
tradictions. As scholars such as Gill and Orgad (2015), Pedwell (2014)
and Winch (2013) have argued, neoliberalism permeates intimate
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
11

aspects of subjectivity in furnishing certain affective possibilities and

suppressing other ones. In a neoliberal conjuncture where the image of
youthful femininity is ‘condensed’ (Hall 1988) with that of the ideal
entrepreneurial subject, certain dispositions are privileged. Namely,
these span dispositions that orient the self towards hypervigilance,
self-monitoring and self-surveillance (Gill 2007), as well as affec-
tive orientations that may be deemed ‘positive’, such as ambition and
optimism, converting negative experiences into feel good outcomes.
Gill and Orgad (2015) notably critique the ‘confidence culture’ span-
ning advertising, lifestyle television and self-help literature. In this cul-
ture, girls and young women as its ideal subjects are enjoined to work
on their own posited lack of self-esteem as problematic, rather than
turn their attention to structural inequalities and collectivist critiques.
Girls and women must confess weaknesses but only in order to over-
come them. For example, emotional hardship may be useful if it can be
rewired into endurance and resilience (Silva 2013). Even love may be
an affective mechanism through which the self is drawn into otherwise
unsustainable and exhausting modes of labour (Mannuevo 2016). As
such, life under neoliberalism requires command of a significant emo-
tional repertoire. Producing the self as both problem and possibility in
one, neoliberal media culture orients young women towards ongoing
self-work, self-fashioning and self-improvement in inculcating continual
desires for ‘the perfect’ (McRobbie 2015).
Accordingly, different forms of neoliberal media culture do not fore-
close possibilities of togetherness and intimacy. Rather, it reconfigures
the role that women in particular must play in securing this possibil-
ity. It selectively draws on and extends historical expectations of women’s
emotional work. Evidently, such work has been highly differentiated by
racialised and classed position, and structures of global wealth and pov-
erty. Yet, the requirement that women secure forms of togetherness can
be seen in a wide variety of practices. This ranges from the use of mobile
media by women from developing countries to maintain transnational
links with family (Cabalquinto 2017), to relatively well-off women in
the West monetising the intimacy of the family home through ‘mommy
blogging’. Such an example is seen in Wilson and Yochim’s (2017) dis-
cussion of the work of American middle class motherhood facilitated
12   A. Kanai

through digital culture. In what they term being ‘mamapreneurial’, in

an intensification of the second shift, mothers’ work in assuring family
happiness never ends. Slipping seamlessly from care work into ‘flexible’
work such as online home-based sales in which personal social networks
are converted into potential consumer markets, the incessant labour
asked of mothers is positioned as customised for their own unique
needs. The temporality and flexibility of digital culture allows middle
class mothers to monetise domesticity (even if inconsistently and pre-
cariously) as creative, publicly-facing labour, displaying ‘work readiness’
in all facets of their lives (Taylor 2016). Lifestyle vlogging in which
girls and young women present the self as an accessible ‘big sister’ or
‘best friend’ (Berryman and Kavka 2017) demonstrates parallels where
commonality, familiarity and affection are demonstrated in the service
of building branded relationships with followers. Thus, as I insist on
throughout this book, the relatability I explore should not be imagined
as separate to neoliberalism but rather, part of its everyday functioning.

Gender and the Affective Dimensions of Media

In a crowded field of scholarship, terms such as ‘feeling’ and ‘affect’
carry baggage, so it is important to clarify how I use them in this book.
This book broadly follows the insight that feeling gives us a sense of
place within the social. This place may be determined in interactions
with others; for example, when minoritised people are judged as overly
invested, ‘involved’ or emotional; or where elite masculinity is per-
formed through detachment. One’s feelings, then, say something about
power and one’s relation towards others. Following Sara Ahmed (2004),
feeling may be thought of as a quality that both ‘moves’ a person, as well
as creating ‘sticky’ immobilities and boundaries. Ahmed reminds us that
the words ‘passion’ and ‘passive’ both derive from the same Latin root,
‘passivus’, implying a vulnerability to being acted on. In contrast, being
‘dispassionate’ suggests a freedom from being acted on matched with the
concurrent ability to judge, to stand apart and remain aloof.
This place within the social may also be signalled through feelings
that reference one’s position within geopolitical formations of power.
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
13

Pedwell’s (2014) discussion of empathy, for example, situates this sup-

posedly universal ‘affective relation’ within Western colonial histories
and the implicit exclusions of liberalism, a relation that expands white
subjectivity while containing the range of feeling of the subjects with
whom empathy may be felt. This is not to say that affective gendered
perspectives are always clearly bounded by bodies, geographical borders
or national histories. Certain understandings of youthful femininity and
its attendant regulation may be transnational (Dosekun 2015; Gwynne
2013), and the highly affective nature of social media is far from being a
one-directional or exclusively Western phenomenon (see, e.g. Lim 2015).
However, what I mean to emphasise is that feeling is structured: it both
implies and remakes a structure of sociality. Through that structure, we
may be positioned in relations of deference, control, attachment, open-
ness or commonality in relation to others. The affective articulations of
femininity I explore here and my readings of them must be noted to
derive from a similar Western location. My own initial delighted sense of
‘shared feeling’ in finding these anonymous digital texts must be contex-
tualised by reference to my relatively cosmopolitan middle class situation
in Western culture, a culture that is shaped and dominated by whiteness,
although I am a non-white woman and aspects of my minoritisation
shape other feelings of ambivalence in relation to the blogs I consider.
Because I wish to focus on the power-striated patterns through
which such affective subjectivities emerge in the intimate public I con-
sider, this book draws on the notion of affect as practice advocated by
Margaret Wetherell (2012). In her words, a focus on affective practice:

tries to follow what participants do. It finds shifting, flexible and often
over-determined figurations rather than simple lines of causation, charac-
ter types and neat emotion categories. (2012, 4)

Affect under this definition centres the social patterns through which it
appears and is negotiated, as opposed to feelings as purely individually
experienced things. This understanding of affect also correlates with the
work of sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1983/2003), whose work on gen-
dered emotional labour I primarily draw on in Chapter 2 to analyse the
affective relational structures of the public. In this book, then, affect is
14   A. Kanai

understood as something that is not neatly separable from discourse and

ontologically positioned on a continuum with emotion (Sullivan 2015).
As Ahmed puts it, in terms of lived experience, we cannot reduce phe-
nomena such as affect or emotion to simply an unmediated ‘sensation’;
indeed, ‘whether something feels good or bad always already involves a
process of reading’ (2004, 7).
I argue that affective practice, and the concordant affective-discursive
approach advocated by Wetherell (2012) can be an appropriate tool for
understanding affective identities produced in digital social spaces for
a number of reasons. First, conceptualising affect as enmeshed within
emotional and discursive meaning allows a pragmatic approach to ana-
lysing textual artefacts that are created within digital social spaces. Such
artefacts are the result of negotiations of discourse and affects that are
intended to be relatable for and understood by others. Though we can-
not expect that others will be affected in precisely the same way by texts,
it is unlikely that these blog posts would be authored for distribution on
Tumblr and beyond without a premise of communicability and emo-
tional ‘reverberation’ (Karatzogianni and Kuntsman 2012). Indeed, as
noted earlier, the first time I encountered the founder blog was when
a friend re-posted one of the blog posts on another friend’s Facebook
page. The post was shared in order to make this friend laugh—and
I did, too. I recognise this humour as not simply a bodily response, but
a response to particular social knowledges and cues in the post. Similar
perspectives are adopted by other scholars researching pseudonymous
or anonymous social digital spaces online where such visual texts are
often swapped (Meese 2014; Milner 2013; Miltner 2014; Nakamura
2014; Shifman 2014; van der Nagel 2013). What is evident in the blogs
I examine is a social system of meaning underpinning the affect circu-
lating through these artefacts, and this is not divorced from the words
and images in them. The GIF posts are circulated precisely because they
communicate affective meaning presumed to be ‘decodable’. The decep-
tively simple blog post combining an image with sparse text requires
active sense-making on the part of the reader, to ‘read’ the puzzle of an
incongruous image and situational heading. The posts in the WSWCM
public form part of a broader web ‘vernacular’ (Burgess 2007) in which
digital ‘netizens’ are now expected to be literate (Shifman 2014).
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
15

For Blackman, feminist scholars in particular need to avoid ‘rein-

stating the notion that the discursive and the material are two sepa-
rate, pre-existing entities that somehow “interact”’ (2007, 1). My aim
is to avoid operating within neat categories that prevent understand-
ing the social distribution and cultural differentiation of affect (see,
e.g. Gunew 2009; Leys 2011; Pedwell 2014). This leads to the situa-
tion where the material, the bodily and the affective, in this paradigm,
cannot be politicised—a serious issue when thinking through both the
connections of affective life and neoliberal vigour, and stratifications of
gender, race and class. Wetherell (2012) similarly makes the point that
much scholarly work that takes affect as an exclusively non-representa-
tional, non-human or bodily response is liable to bracket the insights of
feminist work into socially shaped feeling such as Blackman’s (2007),
Hemmings’ (2005), Hochschild’s (1983/2003) and Berlant’s (2008).
It can also provide an analytical stumbling block when attempting to
understand how affect is produced through texts, digital or otherwise.
From the perspective of the young women who have constructed the
blogs on Tumblr that I consider here, affect is understood to be acces-
sible from the point of view of other Tumblr users, and thus bound up
in representation as a generative, social practice. A claim that it is prior
to or ontologically separable from representation reintroduces an under-
standing, long dismissed in feminist theorisations of media texts, that
representation is only a mirroring of reality rather than entangled in the
production of it. As such, I suggest that what Wetherell (2012) terms
the ‘discourse-tames-affect’ argument evident in some interpretations of
affect also fails to engage with Foucault’s original critique of the repres-
sive hypothesis—that discourse, indeed, is productive and not simply
that which restrains, forbids, and says ‘no’.
My own operationalisation of these concepts attempts to grap-
ple with how identity is produced, represented and actively negotiated
by young women in digital spaces at the same time that certain affec-
tive conditions are already put in place. Viewing affect through the
lens of practice assists in understanding how femininity is work, draw-
ing attention to practices of labour and struggles for value. I proceed
from the understanding that, while the subject of the ‘young woman’ is
a ‘power-effect’ (Tanner et al. 2013), young women also participate in
16   A. Kanai

their modes of subjectification in negotiating the contradictions of the

subjectivities available to them. As Wetherell argues, emotion should
not be subject to a simplistic understanding of intentionality. While
something that is often felt at the level of the ‘gut’ (Wetherell 2012, 12),
affect is both subject to contingent emotional regimes and is something
that people attempt to gain mastery over. Too often affective media
have implicitly been understood in binary terms of sense/sensation and
vulnerability/control that map onto gendered victim/agent dualisms.
In relation to ongoing panics about new(er) media in which media is
characterised as a transmission-based ‘hypodermic’ form of technology,
it is principally white Western girls and young women who have been
figured as the litmus test of vulnerability to media sensation, from the
Victorian sensation novel (Cvetkovich 1992) to social media (Dobson
2015). Such critiques tend to be coterminous with concerns about
mediated emotion, feminisation and privatised, middle class feminin-
ity exceeding its proper limits. Digital media and its leaky ‘promiscuity’
(Chun 2016) is seen to muddy the division between public and private
spheres, and in so doing, threaten discrete gendered boundaries, and
‘adult’ norms. As such, these raced and classed notions of vulnerability,
publicity and privacy cannot be simply ‘corrected’ by reference to the
invocation of an a-contextual agential girl-subject that is always rational,
discerning and in control of digital technology (Gonick 2006; Kanai
2015)—indeed, a subject that reproduces presumptions of white middle
class subjectivity. These conceptual parameters position media as outside
the social, as well as bracketing insights of feminist media scholars into
the powerful cultural incitements to control, discipline and individual-
ity as part of neoliberal media culture, as discussed above.
The kinds of pleasures of connection that I analyse cannot be under-
stood purely within such victim/agent dualisms. Rather, I discuss dig-
ital affective entanglements: intimacy and discipline; self-deprecation
and status; feelings of togetherness and struggles for distinction. As I
explore here, the kinds of disciplinary regimes that regulate girls and
young women, also provide the very means of commonality for those
who are embodied in ways make them proximate to, if not quite suc-
cessful at, the modes of agency such regimes require. As I explore in this
book, the skill in producing feelings of commonality in the blogs often
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
17

departs from and reproduces white middle class presumptions. As Rault

observes in relation to ‘hegemonic whiteness as a series of generalised
“nice feelings”’, the kinds of ‘affective uniformity’ (2017, 586) invited
by the blogs speak to the obscuring of power-based differences. Thus,
the affective negotiations of the blogs both speak to the experience of
being subject to and the subject of power. In terms of affect, the almost
instantaneous feelings associated with ‘getting the joke’, feeling relata-
ble, lovable and intelligible—cannot be understood narrowly within
the terms of oppositions of bodily autonomy versus social constraint.
Rather, they must be situated in technological, cultural and social con-
ditions of possibility that shape the circulation of such bite-sized digital
moments into spaces of intimacy, intimacy premised on the ‘belonging-
ness’ of some bodies more than others.
This book is structured as follows. I begin by setting out the affec-
tive framework of the WSWCM public: its feeling rules (Chapter 2)
and the processes through which one participates in relating to the social
imaginary of the public (Chapter 3). Chapter 2, ‘Managing Relatability:
Feeling Rules and the Practice of Moderation’ outlines how gendered
feeling rules and injunctions to relatability lay a foundation for the affec-
tive ‘optimism’ (Berlant 2008) of the public. Such optimism tethers
young women to gendered standards of perfection, even and precisely
when avowing minor transgressions, failures, and troubles. Here I draw
on Hochschild’s (1983/2003) germinal text, The Managed Heart, to
suggest that rules about young women ought to feel in particular con-
texts structure much of the public’s sociality. These feeling rules require
a self-deprecating but upbeat affective register demonstrating moderate
unruliness and sunny failures. Confessions of minor, acceptable feminine
deviations from white, middle class expectations are provided to readers
on the basis that the blogger demonstrates an overall capacity to package
unpalatable feelings into an amenable form: an inadequacy that is reas-
suringly lighthearted. Accordingly, the bloggers make fun of their desires
to eat copious amounts of food; their boredom at university; being
‘lazy’ when one is expected to be industrious at all times. This strategy
requires playing up both a sincerity and affective investment in demon-
strating an ideal femininity, but importantly, pokes fun at the inability
to achieve it. This strategic averageness both acknowledges hardship
18   A. Kanai

based on social regulation but the ability to take dissenting feelings into
account, transforming difficulties into moments of relational value.
Chapter 3, ‘The Classificatory Reader: Relating to Others Through
Digital Texts’, engages with the question of how participation in the
WSWCM public is enacted, requiring classificatory reading processes
to sort through the highly unstructured and almost complete aesthetic
freedom (Cho 2011) that Tumblr offers. I explore the formation of dig-
ital publics on Tumblr through the affective-discursive textual circula-
tion of readers. Rosenblatt’s (1978) theorisation of aesthetic reading is
applied to understand reading as a experiential, participatory practice
on Tumblr, and consequently the mechanisms through which readers
engage with reaction-GIF texts that circulate in the WSWCM public.
Belonging is premised on the ability to ‘read’ oneself into the zone of
relatability offered in the public. In readers’ transactions with texts, they
must rely on a classificatory competency of sorting and distilling social
categories and moments, and seeing and unseeing attributes of bod-
ies that are gendered, raced and classed. As such, classification of self
and others is not simply the organisation of meaning but productive of
modes of belonging in the public.
Chapter 4, ‘Intimacy and Value: Telling the Self Through Figures’
deals with how claims to value can be made by telling the self through
easily recognisable figures of the everyday gendered imagination. Here,
I explain how the blogs engage in an essentialisation and deployment
of social relationships resulting in the figures of the best friend, the boy-
friend, Other girls, hot guys and creeps that are cited and circulated in
the public. These figures usefully summon and distil a host of narratives,
affects and consequences that tell a story about the blogger rather than
the figures themselves. They enable a valuable selfhood to be claimed
via the production of a moderate girlfriendly balance of affects: mean-
ness to Other girls as ‘constitutive limits’ of the self (Skeggs 2004)
juxtaposed with love for the best friend; or a pleasing self-deprecation
paired with disdain for inferior sexual subjects. Such citation of social
relationships demonstrates concurrent obligations to manage the dis-
play of affective discernment in relation to erotic and gendered capital,
invulnerability in relation to men, as well as traditional classed feminine
requirements of modesty and care.
 1 Do You Relate to This? Femininity, Affective Intimate Cultures …    
19

Chapter 5, ‘The Practices and Politics of a Relatable Brand’ exam-

ines in more detail how relatability is enacted through branded prac-
tices and the identity politics of such a status. Relatability is an affective
relation that is intertwined with bloggers’ capacity to occupy a posi-
tion of ‘normalcy’, a claim of being proximate to but not quite achiev-
ing white, middle class standards of femininity. Being relatable requires
that feelings described in blog posts need to be understood as ‘average’
or ‘normal’ in relation to dominant ideas about femininity—feelings
that ‘every girl’ has. I suggest it is not so much the literal applicability
of blog posts or social media updates themselves that are key to social
connection in digital space, but the way that these moments convey a
particular affective position that summon pleasurable feelings of com-
monality. This relation of relatability is maintained through ongoing
labour and skill that merges both socially reproductive and productive
labour (Jarrett 2015). At one level of practice, this requires the ability
to frame the self in a general way so readers can ‘see themselves’ in the
post and be offered the pleasure of being part of this general femininity.
Relatability, however, is not simply about ‘inclusion’ of unknown oth-
ers but a proprietary claim for young women who embody this pleas-
ing representativeness. Being relatable means being able to lay claim to
experience deemed ‘general’, and tether this claim of generality to indi-
vidual value in ways that tend to reinstate the value of white, middle
class femininity.
Chapter 6 explores how relatability structures the way that feminism
can be expressed and invoked in the blogs. In this chapter, ‘Relatability,
Feminism, and the Shifting Sexual Contract’, I suggest the blogs do
not straightforwardly adopt the mechanism of incorporation and repu-
diation of feminism seen more broadly in postfeminist culture. In the
injunctions to be inoffensive, pleasing and offer pleasures of relatabil-
ity, together with shifting expectations of cultural knowledge of young
women, I suggest that feminism is incorporated and instrumentalised
rather than repudiated. On the level of the practices of subjectivity,
then, I suggest we see some shifts showing the affective incorporation
of feminism, which nonetheless continues to be tethered to measures of
individualised value, rather than collective transformation of the meas-
ures through which such value is determined.
20   A. Kanai

Feeling personally addressed by these blogs, I continue to won-

der about my own implication in the gendered, classed and racialised
structures through which they derive their significance, and the atten-
dant enjoyment from ‘relating’ to them as a non-white, albeit middle
class woman within an imaginary I myself have analysed to be struc-
tured by a white, affective sameness. In Chapter 7, ‘Ambivalence and
Attachment: Some Final Reflections’, I conclude with some reflections
on the politics and practices of feeling together online. Young women
are forging a sense of togetherness online, by articulating a collective
affective attachment to gendered standards which they can never quite
meet, in a funny, upbeat and amusing way. This cruelly optimistic ori-
entation to the world in its attachment to conventions of feminine leg-
ibility is intended to provide a space where common concerns may be
shared. However, implicit in this sameness is the sense that skill, sophis-
tication and resources are required to attain the status of relatability,
reflecting McRobbie’s (2015) insight that in white Western feminine
cultures, even imperfection and its constant avowal is closely tied to the
pursuit of excellence.

Note
1. http://whatshouldwecallme.tumblr.com/post/23590767868/when-
im-drunk-and-trying-to-put-on-heels-while.

References
Abidin, Crystal, and Eric C. Thompson. 2012. “Buymylife.com: Cyber-
femininities and Commercial Intimacy in Blogshops.” Women’s Studies
International Forum 35 (6): 467–477.
Adkins, Lisa. 2003. “Reflexivity: Freedom or Habit of Gender?” Theory, Culture
& Society 20 (6): 21–42. https://doi.org/10.1177/0263276403206002.
Adkins, Lisa. 2016. “Contingent Labour and the Rewriting of the Sexual
Contract.” In The Post-Fordist Sexual Contract: Working and Living
in Contingency, edited by Lisa Adkins and Maryanne Dever, 1–28.
Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
359
As another instance of Dr. Bosanquet’s unintentional
unfairness to his opponents, I would note his positive injustice
to Theism as such. What many of us think of (however
imperfectly) and believe in as God is invariably to him “a
theistic Demiurge in his blankness and isolation.” I do not
believe in such an abstract Demiurge any more than I believe
in the separate, isolated self that he conjures up to his mind
when he thinks of personality. The problem of the twentieth
century may well be what Dr. Ward has signalised as the
relation of God to the “Absolute” of the Hegelian
metaphysicians, but this suggestion simply means to me the
discovery on the part of philosophers of terms and concepts
more adequate to the Supreme Being than either the Absolute,
or the external deity rejected by Dr. Bosanquet.
360
Stéphane Mallarmé, according to Nordau in Degeneration, p.
103.
361
And the general reader must remember that the “whole” is
always (with all due respect to his high dialectic ability and his
high temper of mind and his scholarship) a kind of ignis fatuus
in Dr. Bosanquet’s book, a kind of shadow thrown by the lamps
and the tools of his own choosing in his Quixotic search. The
“whole” is the “perfected individuality” of the individual who
sets out to find truth in this great world of ours with all its real
possibilities of gain and loss. It is the completion of the
“system” of truth to which the truth-seeker would fain reduce
the entire universe, that becomes for him (for the time being)
the mere “subject-matter” of his thought. It is, that is to say, in
both cases, a purely formal conception—an abstraction,
although to Dr. Bosanquet it is the reality implied in the very
existence and activity of the individual thinker. But the latter is
the case to him only because he looks upon man as existing to
think instead of as thinking to exist.
362
That is to say, for the scholar and the lover of Dante and
Dante’s world.
363
For he was not merely a “mind,” reflecting “Italy” and “minds”
and “experiences.”
364
And that, we might add, is still kept alive by some of our
humanists and educators of to-day as the ideal for both
primary and secondary education.
365
This is a thing that the beginner is taught in lectures
introductory to the study of the philosophy of Kant—in regard
to Kant’s relation to the barren, dogmatic formalism of Wolff—a
one-sided interpreter of the philosophy of Leibniz. I am quite
aware that Dr. Bosanquet does not merely use the Principle of
Non-Contradiction in the aggressive, or polemical, manner of
Mr. Bradley in Appearance and Reality. The principle of
positive coherence at which he aims, begins, to some extent,
where Mr. Bradley stopped. But it is still the idea of consistency
or inconsistency, with certain presuppositions of his own, that
rules his thinking; it determines, from the very outset of his
Lectures, what he accepts and what he rejects.
366
See p. 152 and p. 156, note 2.
367
I use this word “must” in a logical as well as in an ethical
sense, seeing that all judgment implies a belief in the reality of
a world of persons independent of the mere fact of “judgment”
as a piece of mental process.
368
See p. 145.
369
On p. 345 the words are: “When we consider the naïve or
elementary life of morality and religion”; and on p. 346: “The
naïve, or simple self of every-day morality and religion,” and
the marginal heading of the page upon which these words
occur is “The naïve good self compared to grasp of a
fundamental principle alone.” Could anything more clearly
indicate what the Kantians call a confusion of categories [in the
case in point the categories of “goodness” and the categories
of “truth”] or what Aristotle calls a μετάβασις εἰς ἄλλο γένος, the
unconscious treatment of one order of facts by the terms and
conceptions of another order of facts. To Dr. Bosanquet as the
Neo-Hellenist that he is in his professed creed, badness is
practically stupidity, and “lack of unification of life,” and “failure
of theoretical grasp.” This confusion between goodness and
wisdom is again indicated on p. 347 in the words: “A man is
good in so far as his being is ‘unified at’ all in any sphere of
wisdom or activity.” [This is simply not true, and its falsity is a
more unforgivable thing in the case of Dr. Bosanquet than it is
in the case of the pragmatists who also tend to make the
‘moral’ a kind of ‘unification’ or ‘effectiveness’ in ‘purpose.’] As
a proof of Dr. Bosanquet’s transformation of the facts of the
ethical life in the interest of logical theory, we can point to p.
334: “Our actions and ideas issue from our world as a
conclusion from its premises, or as a poem from its author’s
spirit,” or to p. 53, where it is definitely stated that the “self, as
it happens to be,” cannot, in any of its “three aspects,” “serve
as a test of reality.” To do the latter, it must, in his opinion,
follow the law of the “universal,” i.e. become a logical
conception. Now of course (1) it is not the self “as it happens to
be” that is chiefly dealt with in ethics, but rather the self as it
ought to be. And (2) the ethical self, or the “person,” does not
follow the “law of the universal” [a logical law] but the law of
right and wrong [an ethical law]. As a proof of the
subordination of the facts of conduct to the facts of aesthetics,
we may take the words on p. 348 where aesthetic excellence
is said to be “goodness in the wider or (‘shall we say’) in the
narrower sense.” Now the distinction between ethics and
aesthetics is not one of degree, but one of kind.
And as another illustration of his tendency to transform
ethical facts in the light of a metaphysical, or a logical, theory
[they are the same thing to him] we may quote the emphatic
declaration on p. 356: “Our effort has been to bring the
conception of moral and individual initiative nearer to the idea
of logical determination,” or the equally outspoken declaration
on p. 353: “But metaphysical theory, viewing the self in its
essential basis of moral solidarity with the natural and social
 world ... cannot admit that the independence of the self, though
a fact, is more than a partial fact.” Or the words at the top of
this same page: “The primary principle that should govern the
whole discussion is this, that the attitude of moral judgment
and responsibility for decisions is only one among other
attitudes and spheres of experience.” These last words alone
would prove definitely the non-ethical character of “Individuality
and Value.” The ethical life is to its author only a “quatenus
consideratur,” only a possible point of view, only an aspect of
reality, only an aspect, therefore, of a “logical system.” Now if
the ethical life of the world is to count for anything at all, it may
be said that the ethical life is no mere aspect of the life of the
self, and no mere aspect of the life of the world, seeing that
“nature” in the sense of mere “physical nature” does not come
into the sphere of morality at all. It is rather the activity of the
“whole self,” or the “normative” reflection of the self as a whole
upon all the merely partial or subordinate aspects of its activity,
upon bodily life, economic life, intellectual activity, and so on
that constitutes the world of morality.
370
See p. 147, and p. 244.
371
Good and evil to Dr. Bosanquet are two quasi-rational systems
in active antagonism as claiming to attach different “principles
and predicates” to identical data. The essence of their
antagonism to Dr. Bosanquet is not, however, that evil is
contemplated, as it must be sooner or later, in repentance for
example as wrong, but rather that the “evil” is an imperfect
“logical striving (p. 351) of the self after unity” which is in
“contradiction with a fuller and sounder striving” after the same.
The evil self is to him merely the vehicle of a logical
contradiction in the self.
372
This is seen in his admission (on p. 351) that the “bad will” no
less than the “good will” is a logical necessity, when taken
along with his doctrine about mind and body, his doctrine of the
“dependence” (p. 318) of the finite individual upon the external
mechanical world. Dr. Bosanquet, of course, thinks that even in
 this apparent Determinism he is justifiably supplementing the
ordinary ideas about the “self” as “creative” and “originative” (p.
354), by the wider recognition that I am more or less
completely doing the work of the “universe” as a “member” in a
“greater self.” And he adds in the same sentence the words
that “I am in a large measure continuous with the greater (p.
355) self,” and “dyed with its colours”—a further step in
Determinism, as it were, and a step which, with the preceding
one to which we have just referred, no critic can fail to connect
with the Determinism that we have already found to be
implicated in his doctrine of the “self,” and in his general
doctrine that the “external” must be frankly accepted as a
factor in the universe.
373
By the “spectator” fallacy we mean his tendency to talk and
think of the self as it is for a spectator or student, looking at
matters from the outside, and not as the self is for the man
himself.
374
Wollaston is the English ethical philosopher who, according to
Leslie Stephen’s account, thought, after thirty years of
meditation, that the only reason he had for not breaking his
wife’s head with a stick was, that this would be tantamount to a
denial that his wife was his wife.
375
See Idola Theatri by Henry Sturt (the editor of the well-known
“Personal Idealism” volume) of Oxford—a book that
enumerates and examines many of the fallacies of the Neo-
Hegelian school. Mr. Sturt’s first chapter is entitled the
“Passive Fallacy,” which he calls, with some degree of justice,
the prime mistake of the idealistic philosophy, meaning by this
the “ignoring” of the “kinetic” and the “dynamic” character of
our experience.
376
It is Natural Theology that is the subject proper of the Gifford
Lectures.
377
See p. 149 of Chapter VI.
378
With, we might almost say, the pragmatists and the humanists.
379
This is really their main distinguishing characteristic and merit.
380
See p. 162.
381
“Indeed, I do not conceal my belief that in the main the work
has been done.”—Preface.
382
I think that the confession is a praiseworthy one in view of the
fact of the prejudice of Rationalism, that philosophy has
nothing to do with convictions but only with knowledge.
383
By belief I have understood throughout this book simply man’s
working sense for reality, and I am inclined to think that this is
almost the best definition that could be given of it—our working
sense for reality. It is at least, despite its apparent
evasiveness, most in harmony with the pragmatist-humanist
inclusion of will elements and feeling elements in our
knowledge and in our apprehension of reality. It is also in
harmony with the conception of reality which may, in my
opinion, be extracted from both Pragmatism and Idealism—
that reality is what it proves itself to be in the daily
transformation of our experience. By the retention of the term
“working” in this attempted definition I express my agreement
with the idea that action, and the willingness to act, is an
essential element in belief. The outstanding positions in the
definitions of belief that are generally given in philosophical
dictionaries are, firstly, that belief is a conviction or subjective
apprehension of truth or reality in distinction from
demonstrable knowledge or direct evidence; and, secondly,
that feeling elements and action elements enter into it. I am
inclined to think that the sharp antithesis between belief and
knowledge, or the tendency of philosophical books to
emphasise the difference between belief and knowledge, is a
characteristic, or consequence, of our modern way of looking
at things, of our break with the unfortunate, medieval
conception of faith and of the higher reason. The study of the
 facts either of the history of religion or of the history of science,
will convince us, I think, that it is always belief, and that it still is
belief (as the working sense for reality), that is man’s measure
of reality, our knowledge about the universe being at all times
but a more or less perfect working out of our beliefs and of
their implications—of our sense of the different ways in which
the world affects us, and of the ways in which we are affected
towards it. Nor do I think, as I have indicated in different
places, that “reality” can be defined apart from belief, reality
being that in which we believe for all purposes, theoretical and
practical and emotional. In the conception of reality as a world
of intersubjective intercourse in which beings, or persons at
different stages of development, share in a common spiritual
life, we have attained so far (and only so far) to the truth that is
common to an idealism of the type of Dr. Bosanquet’s, and to
pragmatist-humanism when properly developed and
interpreted. There are, I find, upon thinking of the matter, any
number of philosophers and thinkers who interpret belief, in the
larger sense of the term, as our complete and final estimate of
reality, and as therefore not exclusive of, but inclusive of
knowledge in the ordinary sense of the term.
384
He even says in the Abstract of his first lecture upon the
“Central Experiences,” that Lord Gifford’s desire that his
lecturers should “try to communicate” a “grave experience” is
the demand that “introduces us to the double task of
philosophy. It [philosophy] needs the best of logic, but also the
best of life, and neither can be had in philosophy without the
other.”
385
Treatise upon Human Nature, sect. vii. (Green and Grose, i.
547).
386
I had originally the idea of calling this chapter by the more
modest title of a note upon “pragmatist elements” in the
teaching of Bergson. I have allowed myself to call it a chapter
partly for the sake of symmetry, and partly because the
footnotes and the criticism (of his Idealism) have carried it
 beyond the limits of a note. I find, too, (as I have partly
indicated in my preface) in the teaching of Bergson so many
things that make up almost the very body of truth and fact
upon which Pragmatism, and Humanism, and Idealism all
repose (or ought to repose) that I quote them directly in my
footnotes. They indicate to me the scope and the territory of
my entire subject. And they are a confirmation to me of much
that I had myself arrived at before I read a line of Bergson.
387
“Our intelligence, as it leaves the hands of nature, has for its
chief object the unorganised solid” (Creative Evolution, p. 162);
“of immobility alone does the intellect form a clear idea” (ibid.
164). “The aspect of life that is accessible to the intellect—as
indeed to our senses, of which our intellect is the extension—is
that which offers a hold to action” (ibid. 170). “We see that the
intellect, so skilful in dealing with the inert, is awkward the
moment it touches the living. Whether it wants to treat the life
of the body or the life of the mind, it proceeds with the rigour,
the stiffness, and the brutality of the instrument not designed
for such use. The history of hygiene or of pedagogy teaches us
much in this matter. When we think of the cardinal, urgent, and
constant need we have to preserve our bodies and to raise our
souls, of the special facilities given to each of us in this field to
experiment continually on ourselves and on others, of the
palpable injury by which the wrongness of a medical or a
pedagogical practice is made manifest and punished at once,
we are amazed at the stupidity and especially at the
persistence of errors. We may easily find their origin in the
natural obstinacy with which we treat the living like the lifeless,
and think all reality, however fluid, under the form of the
sharply-defined solid. We are at ease only in the
discontinuous, in the immobile, in the dead. The intellect is
characterised by a natural inability to comprehend life”
(Creative Evolution, p. 174). (Italics mine.)
388
“I look and I think I see, I listen and I think I hear, I examine
myself and I think I am reading the very depths of my heart.
But what I see and hear of the outer world is purely and simply
 a selection made by my senses to serve as a light to my
conduct; what I know of myself is what comes to the surface,
what participates in my actions. My senses and my
consciousness, therefore, give me no more than a practical
simplification of reality in the vision they furnish me of myself
and of things, the differences that are useless to man are
obliterated, the resemblances that are useful to him are
emphasised; ways are traced out for me in advance along
which my activity is to travel. These ways are the ways which
all mankind has trod before me. Things have been classified
with a view to the use I can derive from them” (Laughter, p.
151). “Life implies the acceptance of the utilitarian side of
things in order to respond to them by appropriate reactions; all
other impressions must be dimmed or else reach us vague and
blurred” (ibid. p. 131). These last words give us a glimpse of a
very important part of Bergson’s teaching—his idea, namely
(Voltaire has it in his Micromégas), that “matter” is greater than
our perceptions, that our perceptions reveal to us only those
aspects of the physical universe with which we are practically
concerned.
389
Some years ago psychologists began to distinguish a
“structural” from a “functional” psychology, meaning by the
former what is otherwise called Psycho-Physics or (to some
extent) Experimental Psychology.
390
Cf. “At first sight it may seem prudent to leave the
consideration of facts to positive science, to let physics and
chemistry busy themselves with matter, the biological and
psychological sciences with life. The task of the philosopher is
then clearly defined. He takes facts and laws from the
scientist’s hand, and whether he tries to go beyond them in
order to reach their deeper causes, or whether he thinks it
impossible to go further, and even proves it by the analysis of
scientific knowledge, in both cases he has for the facts and
relations, handed over by science, the sort of respect that is
due to a final verdict. To this knowledge he adds a critique of
the faculty of knowing, and also, if he thinks proper, a
 metaphysic; but the matter of knowledge he regards as the
affair of science, and not of philosophy” (Creative Evolution,
pp. 204–5). [All this represents only too faithfully what even
some of our Neo-Kantians have been saying, and teaching,
although there is an error in their whole procedure here.]
391
Schopenhauer’s phrase. See my book upon Schopenhauer’s
System.
392
It is chiefly in Matter and Memory (in which, by the way, there
are pages and pages of criticism of the rationalism of
philosophy that are as valuable as anything we have in
philosophy since the time of Descartes—Kant not excepted)
that we are to look for the detailed philosophy of sensation and
of perception, and the detailed philosophy of science upon
which this protest of Bergson’s against the excesses of
“conceptualism” rests. I indicate, too, at different places in this
chapter some of the other special considerations upon which it
rests. The gist of the whole is to be found, perhaps, in his
contention that our science and our philosophy of the past
centuries have both regarded “perception” as teaching us
(somehow) what things are independently of their effect upon
us, and of their place in the moving equilibrium of things—the
truth being on the contrary (with Pragmatism and Humanism)
that our knowledge has throughout a necessary relation to
ourselves and to our place in the universe, and to our liberation
from matter in the life of the spirit.
393
He expresses this idea in the following way in the Introduction
to Matter and Memory: “Psychology has for its object the study
of the human mind for practical utility,” whereas in
“metaphysics” we see “this same mind striving (the idea, as we
say elsewhere, is not free from difficulty) to transcend the
conditions of useful action and to come back to itself as to a
pure creative energy.” Or in the following sentences from his
Creative Evolution: “We must remember that philosophy, as we
define it, has not yet become completely conscious of itself.
Physics understands its role when it pushes matter into the
 direction of spatiality; but has metaphysics understood its role
when it has simply trodden the steps of physics, in the
chimerical hope of going farther in the same direction? Should
not its own task be, on the contrary, to remount the incline that
physics descends, to bring matters back to its origins, and to
build up progressively a cosmology which would be, so to
speak, a reversed psychology. All that which seems positive to
the physicist and to the geometrician would become, from this
new point of view, an interruption or inversion of the true
positivity which would have to be defined in psychological
terms” (pp. 219–20, italics mine).
394
As an indication of what the acceptance of the dynamic instead
of the static view of matter on the part of Bergson means, I cite
the phrase (or the conception) on p. 82 of Matter and Memory,
the effect that “matter is here as elsewhere the vehicle of an
action,” or the even more emphatic declaration on p. 261 of
Creative Evolution, “There are no things, there are only
actions.” It is impossible, of course, that these mere extracts
can convey to the mind of the casual reader the same
significance that they obtain in their setting in the pages of
Bergson, although it is surely almost a matter of common
knowledge about his teaching, that one of the first things it
does is to begin with the same activistic or “actionistic” view of
nature and matter that seems to be the stock in trade of the
physics of our time since the discoveries pertaining to radio-
activity, etc. Being only a layman in such matters, I may be
excused for quoting from a recent booklet (whose very
presence in the series in which it appears is to people like
myself a guarantee of its scientific reliability) in which I find this
same activistic view of matter that I find in Bergson. “What are
the processes by which the primary rock material is shifted?
There is the wind that, etc. etc.... There are the streams and
rivers that, etc.... There is the sea constantly wearing away,
etc.... Then there are ‘subtle’ physical and ‘chemical’ forces.
And the action of plants.... Hence by various mechanical,
organic, and chemical processes the materials originally
 scattered through the rocks of the earth’s crust, and floating in
the air or water, are collected into layers and form beds of
sand, clay, limestone, salt, and the various mineral fuels,
including peat and coal” (The Making of the Earth, by
Professor Gregory, F.R.S., of Glasgow University: Williams and
Norgate).
It is only right to state here, or to remind the reader in this
matter of a “dynamic” view of matter, that Bergson not only
dissipates matter into force or energy or activity (as do the
physicists of to-day), but also actually credits the world of
matter and life with a kind of consciousness (and why not be
courageous about it?) in which what I have already called the
“susceptibility of everything to everything else,” or the action of
everything upon everything else, becomes credible and
intelligible. “No doubt, also, the material universe itself, defined
as the totality of images, is a kind of consciousness in which
everything compensates and neutralises everything else, a
consciousness of which all the potential parts, balancing each
other by a reaction which is always equal to the action,
reciprocally hinder each from standing out” (Matter and
Memory, p. 313).
395
See Chapter III., and also the references to Mach, Ostwald,
Poincaré, and others, in the second chapter and elsewhere.
396
“There is no intelligence in which some traces of instinct are
not to be discovered, more, no instinct that is not surrounded
with a fringe of intelligence” (Creative Evolution, p. 143).
397
“We will not dwell here upon a point we have dealt with in
former works. Let us merely recall that a theory [the theory of
contemporary physiological psychology] such as that
according to which consciousness is attached to certain
neurons, and is thrown off from their work like a
phosphorescence, may be accepted by the scientist for the
detail of analysis; it is a convenient mode of expression. But it
is nothing else. In reality, a living being is a centre of action. It
 represents a certain sum of contingency entering into the
world, that is to say, a certain quantity of possible action—a
quantity variable with individuals and especially with species.
The nervous system of an animal marks out the flexible lines
on which its action will run (although the potential energy is
accumulated in the muscles rather than in the nervous system
itself); its nervous centres indicate, by their development and
their configuration, the more or less extended choice it will
have among more or less numerous and complicated actions.
Now, since the awakening of consciousness in a living creature
is the more complete, the greater the latitude of choice allowed
to it and the larger the amount of action bestowed upon it, it is
clear that the development of consciousness will appear to be
dependent on that of the nervous centres. On the other hand,
every state of consciousness being, in one aspect of it, a
question put to the motor activity and even the beginning of a
reply, there is no psychical event that does not imply the entry
into play of the cortical mechanisms. Everything seems,
therefore, to happen as if consciousness sprang from the
brain, and as if the detail of conscious activity were modelled
on that of the cerebral activity. In reality consciousness does
not spring from the brain, but brain and consciousness
correspond because equally they measure ... the quantity of
choice that the living being has at its disposal” (Creative
Evolution, pp. 266–7).
398
“Instead of starting from affection [or ‘sensation’ in the old
sense of the haphazard sensation] of which we can say
nothing, since there is no reason why it should be what it is
rather than anything else, we start from action, that is to say,
from our power of effecting changes in things, a faculty
attested by consciousness, and towards which all the powers
of the organised body are seen to converge. So we place
ourselves at once in the midst of extended images [to Bergson
as an idealist things are at the same time images or ideas for a
consciousness in other things, or in us, or in beings other than
ourselves], and in this material universe we perceive centres of
 indetermination characteristic of life” (Matter and Memory, p.
67).
399
Cf. the words in the Preface to Matter and Memory: “The whole
personality, which, normally narrowed down by action,
expands with the unscrewing of the vice in which it has allowed
itself to be squeezed,” or the words in the same place about
the task of metaphysics being the attempt of the “mind striving
to transcend the conditions of useful action.”
400
We refer elsewhere in this chapter to Bergson’s idea that living
beings are “centres of indetermination,” that is to say,
creatures who hold their place in nature and that of their
species by “persisting in their own being” (the language of
Spinoza) by acting and reacting upon some of the many forces
of nature that act upon them, and by avoiding the action of
other forces and other animals. “They allow to pass through
them,” he says, “so to speak, those external influences which
are indifferent to them; the others isolated become
‘perceptions’ by their very isolation” (Matter and Memory, pp.
28, 29). We also refer to Bergson’s idea that the life-force has
expressed itself along different grades of being (mineral,
animal, and so on). Both these ideas are a partial explanation
of what we mean by the presence of a spiritual activity in both
inanimate and animate nature. So also is Bergson’s idea that
the purely mechanical explanation either of nature or of life is
but a device of the intellect for the purposes of description.
More specifically it is expressed, too, in his idea that “Our
representation of matter is the measure of our possible action
upon bodies; it results from the discarding of what has no
interest for our needs, or more generally for our functions”
(Matter and Memory, p. 30), or that “Consciousness” is just this
choice of “attaining to” or attending to “certain parts and certain
aspects of those parts” of the “material universe” (ibid. p. 31),
or that “sense-perception” is an “elementary question to my
motor activity.” “The truth is that my nervous system,
interposed between the objects which affect my body and
those which I can influence, is a mere conductor, transmitting,
 sending back, or inhibiting movement. This conductor is
composed of an enormous number of threads which stretch
from the periphery to the centre, and from the centre to the
periphery. As many threads pass from the periphery to the
centre, so many points of space are there able to make an
appeal to my will, and to put, so to speak, an elementary
question to my motor activity. Every such question is what is
termed a perception” (ibid. 40, 41; italics mine). Or, as he puts
it, on p. 313, “No doubt the choice of perception from among
images in general is the effect of a discernment which
foreshadows spirit.... But to touch the reality of spirit we must
place ourselves at the point where an individual
consciousness, continuing and retaining the past in a present
enriched by it, thus escapes the law of necessity, the law
which ordains that the past shall ever follow itself in a present
which merely repeats it in another form, and that all things
shall ever be flowing away. When we pass from pure
perception to memory, we definitely abandon matter for spirit.”
401
Bergson is always able to detect the relapses even of
“mechanism” and of the mechanical philosophy of science into
“finalism,” as when he says on p. 72 of his Creative Evolution,
“To sum up, if the accidental variations that bring about
evolution are insensible variations, some good genius must be
appealed to—the genius of the future species—in order to
preserve and accumulate these variations, for “selection” will
not look after this. If, on the other hand, the accidental
variations are sudden, then, for the previous function to go on,
or for a new function to take its place, all the changes that
have happened together must be complementary. So we have
to fall back on the good genius again to obtain the
convergence of simultaneous changes, as before to be
assured of the continuity of direction of successive variations.”
402
We must remember that to Bergson evolution has taken place
along different lines—those of Automatism (in plant-life),
Instinct (in animal life), and Intelligence (in human life and the
higher animals), and that along none of those lines are we to
 fall into the errors either of materialism, or of “Darwinism” (the
belief in “accidental variations”), or of the “design-philosophy,”
or even of theories like “neo-Lamarckianism” or neo-vitalism.
To him all these philosophies are but imperfect and
hypothetical attempts to grasp “movement” and “life” which
both “transcend finality, if we understand by finality the
realisation of an idea conceived or conceivable in advance”
(Creative Evolution, p. 236).
403
“Paleyism” or “Miltonism” are still good names for the thing, I
have read in some competent book upon Evolution.
404
See below, p. 261.
405
To Bergson concepts are just as hypothetical in the realm of
science, as they are to thinkers like Mach and Poincaré, and
Professor Ward of Cambridge. See the following, for example,
from Matter and Memory (p. 263): “We shall never explain by
means of particles, whatever these may be, the simple
properties of matter; at most we can thus follow out into
corpuscles as artificial as the corpus, the body itself—the
actions and reactions of this body with regard to all the others.
This is precisely the object of chemistry. It studies bodies
rather than matter; and so we understand why it stops at the
atom, which is still endowed with the general properties of
matter. But the materiality of the atom dissolves more and
more under the eyes of the physicist. We have no reason, for
instance, for representing the atom to ourselves as a solid,
rather than as a liquid or gaseous, nor for picturing the
reciprocal action of atoms by shocks rather than in any other
way.” Or, the following characteristic passage from the same
book (p. 280) in respect of the hypothetical character of the
concepts of “pure time” and “pure space”: “Homogeneous
space and homogeneous time are then neither properties of
things nor essential conditions of our faculty of knowing them;
they express, in an abstract form, the double work of
solidification and of division, which we effect on the moving
continuity of the real in order to obtain there a fulcrum for our
 action, in order to fix within it starting-points for our operation,
in short, to introduce into it real changes. They are the
diagrammatic designs of our eventual action upon matter.”
406
Like his celebrated contemporary Eucken, and like many other
thinkers of their time, Bergson is profoundly convinced of the
one-sidedness of the so-called scientific culture of our day, and
of the error of any and all conceptions of education and of
social policy that are based upon it. Although I refer below to
the limitations of his view that the intellect is adapted only to
matter and to mechanical construction, I append the following
quotation as symptomatic of his value as a spiritual teacher in
our scientific age: “As regards human intelligence (Creative
Evolution, pp. 145–6) it has not been sufficiently noted that
mechanical invention has been from the first its essential
feature, that even to-day our social life gravitates around the
manufacture and use of artificial instruments.... This we hardly
realise, because it takes longer to change ourselves than to
change our tools.... In thousands of years, when seen from the
distance, only the broad lines of our present age will be visible,
our wars and our revolutions will count for little, even
supposing they are remembered at all, but the steam-engine,
and the procession of inventions of every kind that
accompanied it, will perhaps be spoken of as we speak of the
bronze or of the chipped stone of prehistoric times; it will serve
to define an age.”
407
I find this in Bergson’s whole attribution of much of our
“perceptual” and “scientific” knowledge of things to the “needs
of action,” and in the detailed reasons that we attempt on
pp. 236–238 to indicate for his polemic against rationalism.
408
This confirmation I find in Bergson’s whole philosophy of
perception and sensation referred to on p. 236, and in his idea
of a living being as a “centre of action” or “a centre of
indetermination.” In fact it is obvious that he is one of the very
greatest of the upholders of the “freedom” of the life of the
individual, and of the fact that each new individual contributes
 something new of its own to the sum-total of existence, to the
life of its species, and to the life of the world. Of course there is
no more an explanation in his teaching of the causes of
“variation” or the differences at birth between the off-spring of
men and of animals, than there is in the philosophy of Darwin.
409
The idea of this necessity is confirmed in Bergson’s whole
philosophy of man’s life as a life of action, as a constant
surmounting of obstacles, as a life that reacts in its own way
upon the life of nature, upon the life of the human species as
such, upon the infinite life and energy and “love” of God—if we
may soar to this great thought. See, for example, what he
writes in explanation of the “discordance” of which he speaks
thus: “Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is
affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to
renew itself by a constant effort: it is dogged by automatism.
The letter kills the spirit. And our most ardent enthusiasm, as
soon as it is externalised into action, is so naturally congealed
into the cold calculation of interest or vanity, the one takes so
easily the shape of the other, that we might confuse them
together, doubt our sincerity, deny goodness and love.” The
explanatory words are the following. [They are quite typical of
the kind of philosophy of life that Bergson thinks of as alone
worthy of the name of a philosophy of the living. And the
reference to “love,” as the highest “dynamic” force in this world
of ours, occurs at their close.] “The profound cause of this
discordance lies in an irremediable difference of rhythm. Life is
general, is mobility itself; particular manifestations of life accept
this mobility reluctantly, and constantly lag behind. It is always
going ahead; they want to mark time. Evolution in general
would fain go on in a straight line; each special evolution is a
kind of circle. Like eddies of dust raised by the wind as it
passes, the living turn on themselves, borne up by the great
blast of life. They are therefore relatively stable, and counterfeit
immobility so well that we treat each of them as a thing rather
than as a progress, forgetting that the very permanence of
their form is only the outline of a movement. At times, however,
 in a fleeting vision, the invisible breath that bears them is
materialised before our eyes. We have this sudden illumination
before certain forms of maternal love, so striking and in most
animals so touching, observable even in the solicitude of the
plant for its seed. This love, in which some have seen the great
mystery of life, may possibly deliver us life’s secret. It shows us
each generation leaning over the generation that shall follow. It
allows us a glimpse of the fact that the living being is above all
a thoroughfare, and that the essence of life is in the movement
by which life is transmitted” (Creative Evolution, pp. 134–5;
italics mine). It is surely needless to point out how much truer
to human nature, truer therefore to an important part of reality,
this life-philosophy is than the abstractionism of Professor
Bosanquet in the preceding chapter.
410
This insistence is, I think, amply confirmed by the very fact of
the immediate contact with life and reality indicated in the
quotation that is given in the preceding note upon the “motive-
awakening,” or the “dynamic” character of the philosophy of
Bergson. It is also confirmed in his manifest insistence upon
the one fact that all philosophy must assume (and has for ever
assumed) the fact of life, the fact of the life and thought of God
that underlies all our life and all our thought.
411
This position of the pragmatists is certainly confirmed by
Bergson’s entire doctrine of the brain and of the intellect—that
their main service is, in the first instance, to interpret the “life”
of things, its relation to our own will and to our practical activity.
I have suggested, too, in this chapter that it is obviously a
characteristic, or a consequence, of the philosophy of Bergson
that our highest thought about ourselves and about the world
should be relative to, and provocative, of our highest emotion.
412
It is only with some degree of care and reservation that I wish
to refer to any apparent confirmation of this idea by Bergson.
And, as always, I object to the idea of any ultimate separation
or “dualism” between faith and knowledge—faith being implied
in all “knowledge.” There is no opposition in Bergson, or in the
 principles of his philosophy, between faith and knowledge; it is
rather his idea that “the faculty of seeing should be made one
with the act of willing” (Creative Evolution, 250; his italics), and
that “philosophy” should “proceed, with the powers of
conceptual thought alone, to the ideal reconstruction of all
things, even of life” (C.E. xi.; italics mine). My reasons for
finding in his writings a confirmation of the idea that it is indeed
our rational and spiritual faith, rather than our demonstrable
knowledge, that is to us the measure of truth and reality, are
such considerations as the following (in addition to those of the
clauses just quoted), his close association between the
intellectual and the “volitional,” his general faith in “creative
evolution,” in the idea that our “consciousness” means for us
“new choices” and (real) “new possibilities,” his faith in the
higher intuitions of the mind, in the spiritual nature of man, his
belief that the building up of the true philosophy of the future
will involve “the collective and progressive effort of many
thinkers, of many observers also, completing, correcting, and
improving one another” (C.E. xiv.), etc. etc.
413
See below, p. 257, note 1.
414
See p. 14 in reference to Dr. Schiller’s suggestion that
“freedom” may “pervade the universe.”
415
“From time to time, however, in a fit of absent-mindedness,
nature raises up souls that are more detached from life....
Were this detachment complete, did the soul no longer cleave
to action by any of its perceptions, it would be the soul of an
artist such as the world has never yet seen” (Laughter, p. 154).
416
Cf. p. 235.
417
Cf. “We must break with scientific habits which are adapted to
the fundamental requirements of thought, we must do violence
to the mind, go counter to the natural bent of the intellect. But
that is just the function of philosophy” (Creative Evolution, p.
31).