Drew Daniel - melancholy is not just an emotional state inside of one person but a socially extended phenomenon, something that connects bodies, signs, symptoms, and persons together

         





Drew Daniel, The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance. Fordham University Press, 2013.





Department of English Assistant Professor Drew Daniel's The Melancholy Assemblage: Affect and Epistemology in the English Renaissance is that rare critical theory book that's fun to read. Consider it a more complexly realized update of Robert Burton's 1621 book The Anatomy of Melancholy, a multidisciplinary rumination on an emotional state believed to be rooted in corporeal imbalances. Daniel treats melancholy as a Deleuzian system of interrelated ideas and, while focusing on the English Renaissance of, say, John Milton's Samson Agonistes, stretches from Galen's humoral medicine to Harry Harlow's isolation experiments with rhesus monkeys to death metal. Yes, it's academic, but Daniel refreshingly spices his arguments with artful prose and candid humor.


This book considers melancholy as an "assemblage," as a network of dynamic, interpretive relationships between persons, bodies, texts, spaces, structures, and things. In doing so, it parts ways with past interpretations of melancholy. Tilting the English Renaissance against the present moment, Daniel argues that the basic disciplinary tension between medicine and philosophy persists within contemporary debates about emotional embodiment.
To make this case, the book binds together the paintings of Nicholas Hilliard and Isaac Oliver, the drama of Shakespeare, the prose of Burton, and the poetry of Milton. Crossing borders and periods, Daniel combines recent theories which have--until now--been regarded as incongruous by their respective advocates.
Asking fundamental questions about how the experience of emotion produces community, the book will be of interest to scholars of early modern literature, psychoanalysis, the affective turn, and continental philosophy.

Drew Daniel’s  The Melancholy Assemblage  offers a wholly original approach tomelancholy in early modern England by approaching it through assemblage theory.Developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in  A Thousand Plateaus  (1980),assemblage theory offers a model of identities as contingent rather than essential by redefining them as assemblages that cohere or dissolve in time as a result of materialand symbolic pressures. Equipped with this analytical model, Daniel reinterpretsmelancholy as a ‘‘discursive surplus’’ (5) rather than a sign of loss, never reducible tomerely a type of substance (black bile) or subject (the melancholic). Instead, themelancholy assemblage demonstrates that a diverse set of material elements andindividual subjects in relation with one another comprise melancholy in the early modern period. That is, the melancholy of the melancholic never exists only insideof the body, but also always through the repetition of its conventional social signs:a medical condition and performance.The two traditions of melancholy, important to Daniel’s argument, producethis split between the inside/outside of melancholy: the first, beginning withTheophrastus’s (pseudo-Aristotle)  Problemata 30.1, describes the passion, whentempered, as the mark of the genius; the second, beginning with Galen, defines thepassion as harmful and pathological. Both traditions, Daniel argues, form a contradictory nucleus to the melancholy assemblage in early modern England, and itis through their interactions with each other in articulations of melancholy that thepassion becomes so imaginatively and intellectually rich with meaning. Because of the myriad symptoms, representations, and types each tradition produces as componentsof the assemblage, Daniel further redefines melancholy as an ‘‘interpretive dynamic’’(5) in which the knowledge of melancholy’s signifiers and the recognition of bodiesthat register those signs comprise epistemologically contested grounds.

Yet the individual body is only one site for melancholy. Daniel’s book positsvarious scales — from the body to social collectivities — at which melancholy findsexpression and extension, which the book’s six chapters study. Chapter 1 traces theproliferation of the melancholic posture — the head propped up by hands — inearly modern visual culture, from Durer’s  Melencolia I  (1514) to Isaac Oliver’s Edward Herbert  (1600 –14), and the posture’s relation to Walter Benjamin’s conceptof creatureliness. Thus in Oliver’s portrait, the melancholy trope signifies bothHerbert’s nobility as well as the thevulnerability of the physicalbody and its artificialposturing. In chapter 2 Daniel expands the scale of the assemblage to the court,reading  Love’s Labor’s Lost  as staging melancholy as a gendered interpretivedynamic through the dialectic of, spinning off from Foucault, ‘‘fashion-knowledge’’(76), in which two male characters, Armado and Biron, must convincingly performmelancholy by citing its known symptoms to prove their love sickness, bothperforming melancholy’s conventions while also ensuring onlookers of theirauthenticity. In contrast, melancholy reduces to a merely somatic condition inthe female body of Katharine’s dead sister, rid of its epistemological complexity.Chapter 3 continues the expansion of scales through an analysis of Antonio’saporetic melancholy in The Merchant of Venice . Antonio’s opening line — ‘‘I know not why I am so sad’’ (92) — produces speculation upon the source of hismelancholy that circulates among charactersin and audiencesof the play. Antonio’sadmission of nonknowledge reflects his desire to be opened up and examined by others — a prolepsis for the masochistic contract he later enters into with Shylock.Similarly, chapters 4 and 6 consider how Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Milton’sSamson, respectively, perform a melancholy that more explicitly introduces theaudience into the assemblage: critics of  Hamlet endlessly circle around the questionof his unsolvable ‘‘mystery’’ — ‘‘that within which passeth show’’ — while criticsof  Samson Agonistes  have, recently, focused on the question of Samson’s intent atthe expense of considering his melancholy and its relation to his masculinity and martyrdom. Finally, in chapter 5 — perhaps the most original of the book —Daniel shifts to a different scale altogether: the textual. Putting together anachronisticmaterials, Daniel reads in Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy  (1621) and WalterBenjamin’sunfinishedandposthumouslypublished ArcadesProject a marriage of true minds: both tomes, dizzyingly encyclopedic and fragmentary, represent the feeling of melancholy’s epistemological structure through the irrespective forms; bothprovide an assemblage of quotations, objects, and traditions that promise but only ever defer knowledge. What makes The Melancholy Assemblage  distinctive and challenging, in themost productive ways, is its sustained discussions of early modern affect in a Deleuzianregister. But perhaps one shortcoming of the book is its undertheorization of theterm affect  (in opposition to emotion ), contrasted by its careful theorization of assemblage  and epistemology, separately and in conjunction. Nevertheless, Daniel’sengagement with contemporary theory shifts the scholarly conversations aroundmelancholy — and early modern affects generally — beyond embodiment orintellectual history (without leaving either behind) to a plane shared by more ontologically and politically oriented studies, such as Jacques Lezra’s  Wild Materialism (2010), and speaks to such studies of affect in contemporary culture asLauren Berlant’s  Cruel Optimism (2011). For these reasons, Daniel’s is an exciting work for both early modernists as well as scholars interested in theories of affectand materiality generally. - Joseph D. E. Bowling

review by Joost Daalder (pdf)