12 - “Bene Comune e Benessere”: The Affective Economy of Communal Life

Summary

In seeking to understand and account for the emotional landscape of the medieval and Renaissance Italian communes one is faced with a range of problems that confront any writer seeking to capture something as omnipresent and yet ephemeral as everyday feeling. For the historian, the problem of the ephemeral nature of emotions and feelings is compounded by the additional loss that is consequent on the passage of time. Relatively recently an increasing body of critical work has turned its attention to the interrogation of the world of experience rather than the interpretation of symbolic forms. In sociology and human geography, the emergence of the field of so-called “nonrepresentational theory” and the publication of a number of studies that examine and analyze the aesthetics of presence has seen an attempt to foreground “being” rather than “meaning” in the description of affects rather than the reading of texts, privileging phenomenology over hermeneutics. One consequence of this approach has been to describe presence as a form of transcendental experience that escapes social and cultural mediation and is immune to time and space in an almost mystical manner. Areas as diverse as medieval metaphysics and modern day neuroesthetics are invoked to prove the thesis.

Yet the fact remains, that however much such critical approaches seek to distance themselves from the realms of social and cultural analysis in arguing for an unmediated transcendental aesthetic, emotions, and “the felt immediacy of sensual experience” are unavoidably socially mediated and culturally specific. To a medieval and Renaissance readership versed in faculty psychology and the basics of moral philosophy, such a disaggregation of mind and body was unimaginable. In fact the current return to the senses and the so-called “affective turn” in cultural theory can be read as little more than the reestablishment of the premodern link between cognition and sensation, a return to the long held assertion of the interdependence of psychology and physiology in the reading of human behavior. This link was trenchantly refuted by Cartesian mind-body dualism with its exclusive investment in reason as the only means whereby universal truths could be established.