Affinities

Potent Connections in Personal Life

Jennifer Mason

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780745664644, 9780745664637
• eBook ISBN: 9781509524303
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

How is it possible to feel an affinity with a place? What is happening when someone feels almost literally transported to another time by a smell or a texture or a song? Why do striking family resemblances sometimes feel uncanny? In each of these cases a potent connection is being made, involving forces, flows, energies and atmospherics that conventional sociological approaches can find hard to grasp, but that are important nonetheless. In this innovative book Jennifer Mason argues that these are affinities – potent charges and charismatically lively connections in personal life, that rise up and matter in some way and that enchant or toxify the everyday. She suggests that exploring affinities opens up new possibilities for conceptualizing the experience of living in the world through what she calls the 'socio-atmospherics of everyday life'. This book invites the reader to embrace possibilities and themes that may seem outside the usual range, and to engage in a more open, attentive, inventive and poetic sociological sensibility.

PART ONE
Sensations of Living

Why Sensations?

We sense others. We know what they are like and who they are by seeing, touching, smelling, hearing and generally experiencing the sensations of them, at the same time as they are experiencing the sensations of us. We know what it feels like to be with and apart from them and in that sense our relations generate sensations. We know how they are with us (their manner of being with us, of interacting with us, their character and demeanour with us and so on) in these ways. More than that, we do not even have to be physically with others in the moment to experience the sensations of them, and of being with or connected to them, because sensations can be manifest in memory and imagination, just as longing or dread about the company of another can be experienced in sensory-kinaesthetic ways. We can conjure up as well as remember the sensations of others and how they are with us. Such sensations can form part of the weight of grief for example, felt as sensations of the mind, soul, head and chest. Contrary to popular assumption, online and ‘virtual’ interactions are also full of sensations, often bringing faces to faces quite literally in direct interactions with one’s own and others’ faces and bodies, words (spoken or created and experienced in text and symbols), language, sound and noises, immediate environments – and all this viewed on our screens, physically felt, sensed and executed through our bodies, including our fingers as we stroke and tap our devices, aurally heard and encountered in our earphones (see, for example, Jamieson, 2013; Morgan, 2009: 106–7; Wilding, 2006). It is in these ways that the experience of living routinely involves tuning into its sensory-kinaesthetics.

Of course, once we start to think about it, all life is lived in and through these sensory-kinaesthetic registers – even the so-called ‘virtual’ – but they are not usually factored into sociological understandings of relationships. Except perhaps sometimes in the sphere of romantic relationships and sexual attraction (and even there the focus is more usually on appearance as an individual characteristic or a personal preference), most analyses of relationships and relating are curiously drained of any sensations, to the extent that a scholar of relationships might be forgiven for thinking that sensations are not involved at all. Yet in everyday life it is well known that sensations are important: for example, whether or not we experience touch, or face-to-face contact in our personal relations with various others, and what it feels like; whether certain interactions are experienced as full of noise or silence, movement or stasis; whether we sense a good vibe between people or an atmosphere that you could ‘cut with a knife’; the capacity of a particular smell or a piece of music to evoke particular occasions in our relationships with others, or to virtually transport us to them. These kinds of examples point to the constitutive role of sensations in social life and interactions, as well as the need for those who wish to study and explain these things – like sociologists – to engage in a sensory-kinaesthetic attunement.

Part of the problem with sensations is probably that sociologists and others do not quite know what to do with them when it comes to analysing relationships, even though as people who live in the world and have their own relationships, they must understand their importance at some level. So even though there is increasing interest in the anthropology of the senses and environmental philosophy (for example, Abram, 1997; Classen, 1992, 2012; Howes, 1991; Howes and Classen, 2014; Pink, 2015), or the sociology of the senses (Lyon and Back, 2012; Mason and Davies, 2009; Riach and Warren, 2015; Vannini et al., 2011; or the journal The Senses and Society, established in 2006) or indeed the sociology of the body or embodiment (for example, Burkitt, 2010; Crossley, 2006; or the journal Body and Society, established in 1995), these do not have a great deal to say about sensations in relationships. For the most part they prefer to keep the level of analysis at either the ‘self’ or ‘society’ or ‘culture’. If we look more specifically from the perspective of the families, relationships and intimacies field, we have seen an interesting ‘cultural turn’ away from more abstract structuralist approaches, with a greater focus on relationships as everyday practices which can include exploring the role of feelings (as in emotions), embodiment, or of things and objects (for example, Gabb, 2008; Gillis, 1997; Morgan, 1996; Smart, 2007). And there have been interesting developments in interpersonal dynamics and the psychology of ‘affect’, which explicitly wants to draw emotion into the frame (for example, Brennan, 2004; Wetherell, 2012). But notwithstanding these, and with some notable exceptions (for example, Davies, 2015; Widerberg, 2010), relationships still are often analysed without much or any attention to sensations that might characterise or constitute them, and indeed often without recourse to a sensory-kinaesthetic register of any sort. Alternatively ‘the sensory’ is often analysed without much or any attention to relationships or to the mutualities and dynamics of sensations. As a consequence, it is still perfectly respectable to conceptualise a ‘relationship’ as a rather abstract thing that has little or nothing to do with sensation, which is, I think, a pity. In opposition to this, I am going to argue in this part of the book that sensations constitute a ‘core seam’ in our relationships with others (see also Mason, 2008), rather than simply our way of perceiving them, or a kind of adjunct to them (for example, as we might think of ‘relationships and the senses’).

My use of the term ‘sensation’ is quite deliberate, and yet requires certain caveats. ‘Sensation’ is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘a physical feeling or perception resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with the body’ (ODE, 2005). I am loosening and taking liberties with that definition somewhat, so that for me ‘sensations’ encompass the idea that they are not only felt, perceived and experienced in ‘the body’, but also that they emanate and flow in things that happen, and things coming into contact. Furthermore, it is an important part of the argument I develop in the book that we think generously and innovatively about what those ‘things’ that happen or come into contact might be. So instead of sensations being the felt effect of external stimuli, perceived or received via bodily receptors or mental faculties, I will argue that they flow through and are generated in encounters. This is crucial in my argument, and requires a more open and interactive conceptualisation than is sometimes applied to the idea of ‘the senses’ in the social and human sciences. What is more, in using the concept of sensation I want to gain a distance from the conceptualisation of particular senses as individual and mutually distinct, either from each other, or as separable from the experience of living in, moving within, relating with and apprehending the world. I am following Merleau-Ponty (2002 [1945], 2004 [1948]), Benjamin (1999), and in particular Ingold (2000, 2011) in this approach, but I shall also draw other ideas and insights into the frame.

Once we start to take sensations seriously, as I try to do in this part of the book, something else happens however. If my starting point was a desire to ‘inject’ sensations into the lacking-in-sensations study of interpersonal relationships, I quickly realised that sensations will not be contained in such a framework, and neither will the affinities they express. The energies and sensations of affinities operate not only within but way beyond and outside of interpersonal relationships, and this part of the book is thus a gateway to a much wider appreciation of affinities in the book as a whole. The major premise of this part of the book is that affinities are lived, made up of, and made potent through and in sensations. We might usefully see sensations as part of the habitat of affinities, or as an essential element in the atmospherics that can create affinities. And at the same time the visceral, moving and affecting nature of sensations is an important clue to understanding the potency of affinities. But we cannot appreciate and apprehend all of this unless we are prepared to tune into the sensory-kinaesthetics of the world around us.

What follows is a selection of facets, which are designed to illustrate and help to explore some of the ways that sensations are implicated in affinities, and in constituting them as more or less potent. In writing the facets I have consciously tried out a sensory-kinaesthetic attunement, directing this to a range of encounters and materials that help to draw to light the centrality of sensations in interpersonal relationships. This involves writing differently and variously across the facets. I have chosen to include facets with the aim of creating insights into sensations and the part they play in affinities, rather than representing a particular range or making any claims about propensities and patterns. The aim is to enable you to see what sensations can be in the world and maybe, hopefully, to inspire you to wonder about sensations and affinities that touch you, and to use this kind of attunement in your own field. After the facets, I draw together some of the threads and engage with wider literature and debate, so that I can take forward some propositions and ideas about affinities – in the process moving beyond the confines of interpersonal relationships – into the next part of the book.

Facets of Sensation

1. Ashes, ghosts and the ‘sense of presence’

My father died a year ago. I have his ashes in a large green plastic canister, alongside my mother’s, which are in a mud-brown coloured canister, under a desk in the room where I work and write. The canisters have been labelled administratively, simply and clearly, by someone whose job was to ensure or to reassure that there was no mix up; to convey a clinical sense of certainty about what or who the canisters contained. The canisters are functionally shaped in ways that would be readily stackable on shelves, with the labels showing for ease of retrieval, and they have a surprising heft given how slight and frail both of my parents were when they died.

I don’t look very often at the contents of the canisters, but I know what is there. A startlingly large quantity of stuff; a mixture of fine dust and more coarse-grained gravelly bits. It doesn’t exactly look like ash, or ashes as we come to pluralise them under these circumstances. It looks more like builders’ dust. I can see it in my ‘mind’s eye’, feel it in my mind’s fingers, sniff it with my mind’s nose – my ‘sensory imagination’ (Mason and Davies, 2009) – without having to unscrew the lid and look, and I can feel its texture without actually ever having had the nerve to plunge my hand in and ferret about it in, although I know one day I will, and I have often anticipated lifting out a handful and scattering it somewhere meaningful. I can smell it or, more precisely, I can smell the curious absence of any smell at all, as some of the finer dust rises into the air and enters my nostrils, like a chalky grey vapour that hits my olfactory senses with a form of substance, but not of odour. All this without needing to take the lid off every time. What sensory-kinaesthetic stuff this is!

It is a form of stuff that raises uncertain and awkward questions because in many ways I do not trust it. What is it, this dusty, grainy, gravelly stuff? What are the bits? Are they bone, teeth, bits of coffin? Why aren’t there some really big lumps, if it really is what is left behind in the incinerator when the heat has died down? If the stuff is ash – as they would have us believe – why doesn’t it smell of smoke or incineration, or of anything for that matter? How was it gathered? Was it tipped or swept into this functional plastic container, or vacuumed, or scooped by someone’s bare or gloved hand? Did any get dropped on the floor, or brushed off onto someone’s clothes? Did it make anyone sneeze? Was it sieved into finely graded grains like the McDougalls finer flour used to be, to get rid of the big lumps, or the odd tooth or bit of vertebra, the odd molten filling. What happened to those big lumps? Were other bits, dust and debris from the floor or the incinerator, other people’s ashes, swept up along with it, in a subtle subversion of the individuality and certainty of the label on the canister? Was it topped up with some spare dust or ash because my small, frail dad (big man of previous years) and his wicker coffin hadn’t generated a convincing enough mass or volume? Of course I can’t actually ask such questions of the undertaker, partly because to do so is to challenge or doubt the carefully constructed line between the sacred and the profane that we have all been heeding and negotiating, in keeping with Western death and burial rituals (Hallam and Hockey, 2001). Ashes are sacred and revered in the material culture of death, and worse than questioning the undertaker’s professional practice would be the sense that I was disrespecting the memory of my father.

But I do not entirely trust the ashes. Sometimes, for no apparent reason, my sensory imagination will conjure up the grainy grittiness of this dusty stuff when I am doing something quite other, alone or in company, and I will find myself contemplating its peculiar yet mundane nature and the questions about sensory dis/belief that it raises. My dad (only once dead) was burned up, and this is what is left. How can I be exp...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Affinities as an Invitation to Think Differently
• PART ONE: SENSATIONS OF LIVING
• PART TWO: INEFFABLE KINSHIP
• PART THREE: ECOLOGIES AND SOCIO-ATMOSPHERICS
• Conclusion: Affinities in Time
• References
• Index
• End User License Agreement