Affective Societies

Key Concepts

Jan Slaby, Christian von Scheve, Jan Slaby, Christian von Scheve

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138488861
• eBook ISBN: 9781351039246
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life in the mobile and networked societies of the early 21st century.

This volume introduces a unique collection of essential concepts for theorizing and empirically investigating societies as Affective Societies. The concepts promote insights into the affective foundations of social coexistence and are indispensable to comprehend the many areas of conflict linked to emotion such as migration, political populism, or local and global inequalities. Adhering to an instructive narrative, Affective Societies provides historical orientation; detailed explication of the concept in question, clear-cut research examples, and an outlook at the end of each chapter.

Presenting interdisciplinary research from scholars within the Collaborative Research Center "Affective Societies," this insightful monograph will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as affect and emotion, anthropology, cultural studies, and media studies.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Affective Societies – key concepts

Jan Slaby and Christian von Scheve

Affect and emotion have come to dominate discourse on social and political life at the beginning of the 21st century. In politics, the rise of populism and new styles of political contestation are frequently described with reference to their emotionalizing and affectively polarizing qualities. Surging religious conflicts across the globe are portrayed through an affective lens, highlighting the importance of anger, rage, offense, and indignation for prolonged conflict. Capitalist economies are increasingly understood as exploiting not only people’s cognitive and bodily capacities, but also their feelings and emotions. Practices of social media often come with intensified displays of affect, frequently addressed adversely at individuals or groups in an openly hostile or even violent manner.

This current “emotional reflexivity” – the tendency to understand and portray the social world in terms of feelings and emotions – is not confined to public spheres and political debates, but has been preceded by a “turn to affect” within different academic disciplines. This is neither a historical coincidence, nor academia’s talent for foretelling the future. Research in the social and behavioral sciences as well as in the humanities and cultural studies has long suggested that affect and emotion are so intricately and essentially human that they form the fundamental basis of being and sociality. As a consequence, these disciplines have continuously developed theories that account for the role of affect and emotion in social life, both in terms of general social and cultural theory and in terms of understanding their importance for historically and culturally distinct societies.

Affective Societies is the theme of an interdisciplinary research initiative that acknowledges and systematically extends these insights to study the affective and emotional dimensions of contemporary social and societal coexistence. It is based on a theoretical and diagnostic approach centered on a social-relational and situated understanding of affect and emotion. This perspective comes with a methodological orientation focusing on empirically grounded approaches. These approaches are capable of illuminating the affective dynamics of societal coexistence in their local specificities within different domains of life in contemporary societies. The present volume develops a tableau of key concepts that are foundational to this outlook. It offers a framework for the study of affect and emotion across a spectrum of disciplines in the social sciences, cultural and media studies, and the humanities. The book thus aims at contributing to and further developing in a systematic and innovative fashion work belonging to the broader theoretical movement in the humanities and cultural studies variously called “affect studies” or the “turn to affect.” It will do so in a way that re-connects these recent strands of theorizing with long-standing work on emotion and affective phenomena undertaken in other disciplines, in particular the social sciences, that has mostly remained outside the spotlight of these currently much-discussed lines of inquiry.

In this introduction, we will outline the overall perspective of this research initiative and explain the rationale of the present volume. We begin by discussing its title: Affective Societies. We will expound upon Affective Societies as both a theoretical designator capable of orienting productive work in social and cultural theory and a diagnostic-analytical lens for coming to terms with a salient range of recent societal developments. Along the way, we sketch the main theoretical trends that inform the approach to affect and emotion essential to all of the chapters in this volume. These include a dynamic-relational and situated understanding of affective phenomena, a perspective on embodied yet mobile repertoires of emotion, practices of mediation, and performativity. They encompass the global circulation of symbols, forms, and styles within public spheres and realms of political debate that have witnessed substantial changes over the past decade. We then introduce our understanding of concepts as dynamic templates for analytical articulation. We conceive of concepts as generative schemas linking disciplinary perspectives and bridging theory with research. At the same time, concepts are rallying points for contestation and debate, epitomizing what is not yet understood, and thereby propelling research forward. Furthermore, we explain the logic that informs the four thematic parts of the volume and outline the generic format of the 29 chapters. We close with an outlook on pressing issues for future research.

Affective Societies: theoretical and diagnostic perspectives

Human coexistence is profoundly a matter of affect and emotion. This is obvious for elementary forms of sociality unfolding in face-to-face interactions or close-knit communities. It is no less evident in the formation and makeup of larger-scale forms of social organization, with regard to questions of stratification and inequality, migration, integration, and social cohesion, institutional change and stability, belonging and identification, or conflict and conflict resolution. Political communication, for example, is an area of sustained, elaborate, wide-ranging, and often expertly performed emotionalization. Likewise, the creation and circulation of cultural ideals of coexistence, forms of belonging, or ways of being a person or a citizen are thoroughly affective and often tied to specific emotions. Somewhat less obvious – at least by conventional standards of social and political theory – is the involvement of affect and emotion in the strategies of governance employed by state actors to secure allegiance and elicit conformity among its constituents. Here too, a perspective focusing on affect and emotion will reveal a range of important insights. For instance, it will bring to light strategies directed at the cultivation, regimentation, and discursive elaboration of sentiments, affective styles, and emotion repertoires, for instance, those pertaining to aspects of belonging and collective identity or to modes of compliance with the demands of prevailing political and economic powers. Governing subjects necessarily involves governing their hearts. Or, at any rate, it involves sustained and far-reaching attempts to do so, which are often met with resistance and may have profound unintended consequences, which are usually themselves matters of intensive affect.

Affect and emotion are also highly prevalent in those social structures and social situations in which inequalities and power relations bound to race, class, and gender are rampant. While these categories and their intersections have been investigated by various disciplines with regard to social, economic, and political standing and in view of identities and identity politics, their affective constitution has by and large received only scarce attention. Race, class, and gender, unlike many other forms of social differentiation, inherently involve affective processes of othering that go hand in hand with relational modes of address, distinction, and valuation. Memorably analyzed by Frantz Fanon (1952/2008) in the case of race, such historically grounded markers of human difference are established and sustained for the most part by way of antagonistic affective relations (→affects of racialization). Such processes of categorical marking are inherently affective, that is, they involve potentialities for action which can manifest as (subtle or not so subtle) affective dispositions or as out-right emotions, such as ressentiment, shame, fear, pride, and the like. In view of widespread xenophobia and the continued prevalence of structural discrimination and institutional racism, Fanon’s searing analytic of the affective and corporeal workings of racialization is certainly ripe for an emphatic revival.

Considering these involvements and intricacies, the long-standing assumption in social theory of a dichotomous opposition between affectivity and rationality turns out to be grossly inadequate. While it may still be reasonable to describe aspects of the formation of modern societies and nation states and their various agencies and institutions as processes of rationalization, the assumption that there is a corresponding de-emphasizing of affectivity is profoundly misguided. In research on affective phenomena, the dichotomy of emotion and reason has long given way to views that stress their entanglement and mutual co-dependence. Affectivity is indispensable for assessments of relevance, for the formation of value and valuation, and for keeping social practices focused on what issues are of concern and what is at stake. Without affectivity, nothing resembling real-life evaluation and decision-making would be possible at either the individual or the collective level.

Accordingly, current theorizing on affect and emotion, especially (but not only) in fields such as cultural affect theory, philosophy and sociology of emotion, as well as cultural anthropology, favors a more elaborate and realistic picture of how contemporary forms of social organization, social collectives, and their many forms of governance and coordination operate, and of how they have emerged historically. Likewise, this more recent research enables scholars to better understand how the development of these social formations and agencies has been crucially involved in the genesis and subsequent modulation, disciplining, and governing of the classical “human subject” of Western modernity. By turning toward the affective and emotional dimensions of sociality, social theory catches up with state-of-the-art scholarship on emotion and affect. This work neither assumes a dichotomous opposition between affectivity and rationality, nor does it consider affect to be a private, inner, exclusively “subjective” affair. Instead, it foregrounds the situatedness of affect and emotion and emphasizes the dynamic relationality of affective processes in their embodied and embedded specificity and with regard to their efficaciousness as forceful relations in various local and translocal contexts. Here, affective, cognitive, and volitional elements are inextricably entangled. As such dynamic comportments, affects and emotions are indispensable driving forces in the constitution of practices, forms of life, institutions, groups, and social collectives. The title Affective Societies and the chapters comprising this key concepts volume take up several significant lines of work on affect and emotion with the aim of investigating the affective and emotional dimensions of social coexistence in contemporary societies.

A social theory perspective

Affective Societies is primarily a theoretical denominator of the systematic multi-faceted involvement of affect and emotion among the processes that enable, create, sustain – but also threaten or disrupt – human social and societal life. As an orientating concept, it covers the entire spectrum of social theorizing, combining elements of both general social theory and diagnostic theories of societies. This useful distinction, however, is more prominent in the German academic context and less widely used in the Anglophone world. In Anglophone contexts, the term “social theory” is commonly used to denote both general theories of the social (Sozialtheorie) and theories of historically specific societal formations or societies, often uniting diagnostic, critical, and normative dimensions (Gesellschaftstheorie). Yet these distinct types of theory are interconnected in that any social theory is developed within the specific social and historical context within which the researcher is embedded. In addition, any theory of society relies on concepts of social theory and corresponding “middle range” theories (cf. Lindemann, 2009, who draws on Georg Simmel’s distinction of these types of theory).

In terms of social theory, Affective Societies addresses foundational problems and questions generally pertaining to the social as recurring in different disciplinary contexts, such as anthropology, philosophy, sociology, or cultural studies. From this perspective, affect is suggested as an essential social theoretical concept, much like other prominent concepts in existing social theory, for instance, agency, reciprocity, interaction, communication, or intention. Affect is hence not merely an add-on to these more established notions, but a foundational dimension of interpersonal relationality itself – it is the central dynamic force of social connectedness, ranging from face-to-face encounters to various interactive dynamics between individuals and collectives as well as inter- and intra-group relations. The latter examples, in particular, already permeate the borders of what is known as “middle range” theories in some disciplinary contexts (Merton, 1968), which take particular empirical social phenomena under scrutiny, such as racism, economic exchange, or social mobility. Theories of ritual interaction are a good example of a middle range theory, in particular because affect and emotion have traditionally played a central role therein. Durkheim (1912/1995) was interested in how solidarity can be maintained amongst group members and suggested that rituals and collective effervescence (which can be understood as a form of affective resonance) tie group members to one another and to the group’s shared values. Collins (2004) later extended this theory to include the concept of emotional energy as an outcome of ritual interaction. Theories like these are usually informed by or are extensions of specific social theories and, as becomes evident in the many examples in this volume, can provide novel understandings of both micro- and macro-level social phenomena as fundamentally rooted in affect and emotion. These include family relations, healthcare, audiences, literature and the arts, communities, political parties, organizations, or social institutions such as the law, religion, or mass media.

A diagnostic angle

Aside from this emphasis on social theory and corresponding “middle range” theories of and empirical research on concrete social phenomena, Affective Societies also bears a diagnostic and critical angle as it is found in many theories of societies. These theories circumscribe specific and historically situated larger societal formations, in most instances societies in modern (Western) nation states. They usually rely on specific assumptions and concepts of social theory and, more often than not, integrate and synthesize arrays of “middle range” theory and research on phenomena that scholars deem idiomatic and important for a specific (type of) society. Examples would include theories of the post-industrial (or knowledge) society (e.g., Bell, 1973), of modern capitalist society (e.g., Boltanski & Chiapello, 2007), of the risk society (Beck, 1992), or of the information and network society (e.g., Castells, 2010) (see Schimank & Volkmann, 2007, for a broader assessment).

With regard to contemporary societies, there seems to be something novel and urgent going on when it comes to manifestations of affect in public discourse, as part of political communications, in mediatized social interactions, and in more overarching attempts at managing, controlling, and governing affect and emotion. In the economy, for example, a neoliberal ideology increasingly addresses – and exploits – people’s emotions and seeks to establish forms of affective governance that aim at maximizing corporate revenue. The infamous Facebook experiment in 2012 that manipulated users’ newsfeeds according to their affective implications, pertinent cultural programs that emphasize happiness, well-being, and emotional intelligence, and on- and offline assessments of users’ emotional states for the purposes of targeted and personalized advertising are but some of the developments we have in mind. Another example is a series of recent political events and developments that have signaled a sea change in public communication and global politics. New forms of social media activism bring politically pressing issues onto the public agenda and mobilize attention and involvement rapidly and with unprecedented reach. Political parties and protest movements emerge and rally around salient issues as a result of novel forms of mediatized interaction in a decentralized landscape of communications. In general, there is a heightened sense of – or one might say even hunger for – spontaneous, informal, highly sensuous modes of affective associations, resulting in transient collectives or affective communities (→affective communities). At the same time, one cannot fail to notice the widespread emergence, public appeal, and sustained success of right-wing populist parties across Europe and the world, and their reliance on highly affective modes of communication. This accompanies a substantially altered political climate, evidenced by the increasingly divisive nature of political debate and practices in the context of the so-called European “refugee crisis” since 2015. Other landmark events in this regard are the successful Brexit campaign of 2016 with its polarizing debates, the shameless recourse to fake news, the election and subsequent public displays of “twitter president” Donald Trump, or more generally the emergence of and support for illiberal and anti-democratic regimes and dictators across Europe and the world. Concomitantly, rumors, smear campaigns, and conspiracy theories are in high demand – it seems that what “feels true” increasingly wins the day over knowledge claims grounded in evidence, including those brought forth by acclaimed experts or members of the intellectual establishment. No less significant are the rampant forms of trolling, countless instances of hate speech, or the strategic circulation of misinformation online (as well as offline) that have begun to profoundly affect the social life and political...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Funding note
• 1 Introduction: Affective Societies – key concepts
• PART I: Affect and emotion: charting the landscape
• PART II: Elaborating affect
• PART III: Resonances and repertoires
• PART IV: Collectives and contestations
• Index