Affective Methodologies

Developing Cultural Research Strategies for the Study of Affect

Britta Timm Knudsen, Carsten Stage

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349553051, 9781137483188
• eBook ISBN: 9781137483195
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Social Sciences

The collection proposes inventive research strategies for the study of the affective and fluctuating dimensions of cultural life. It presents studies of nightclubs, YouTube memes, political provocations, heritage sites, blogging, education development, and haunting memories.

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Introduction: Affective Methodologies

Britta Timm Knudsen and Carsten Stage

The aim of the anthology

The motivation for this anthology is a challenge raised in the growing volume of academic work on affective processes – or what is often termed ‘the affective turn’ in contemporary cultural analysis (Clough, 2007; Thrift, 2008; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Blackman, 2012; Wetherell, 2012; Leys, 2011; Ahmed, 2004). The challenge under discussion is how to develop and account for methodologies that enable cultural researchers to investigate affective processes in relation to a certain empirical study. The collection’s main methodological focus is thus how to perform empirically grounded affect research. We define an affective method as an innovative strategy for (1) asking research questions and formulating research agendas relating to affective processes, for (2) collecting or producing embodied data and for (3) making sense of this data in order to produce academic knowledge. The aim of this edited collection is therefore not to challenge or deconstruct established methodological categories (e.g., research questions, data production and data analysis), but rather to begin experimenting with how these categories can be used and reinterpreted in inventive ways in order to engage with the immaterial and affective processes of social life. The chapters in the collection deal with the various elements of this definition in different ways: some focus more on starting points and asking questions, others more on the production or sense-making of data through the use of new analytical and conceptual approaches. We do not presume to have solved the methodological challenges of doing affect research once and for all, but hope that the collection will help and inspire researchers and students preparing or developing methodologies for studying affect in new ways.

Developing affective methodologies is, of course, a huge challenge: how do you identify affective processes and discuss their social consequences through qualitative research strategies if affect is bodily, fleeting and immaterial and always in between entities or nods? This question, and focus on immateriality, flux and bodily engagement, seems to be at the center of a range of recent books on methodology, such as John Law’s After Method (2004), which suggests that we should begin to investigate new ‘forms of knowing as embodiment’ (Law, 2004, p. 3) in order to grasp the messiness, ephemerality and unpredictability of social life; Les Back and Nirmal Puwar’s edited collection, Live Methods (2012), focusing on developing tools for a ‘live sociology’ that avoids only working with ‘fossil facts’ (Back, 2012, p. 21); or Rebecca Coleman and Jessica Ringrose’s Deleuze and Research Methodologies (2013), where a key interest is how to map the flux and flows of the social in ways that trace ‘what is impossible, what becomes stuck and fixed’ (Coleman and Ringrose, 2013, p. 9) (see also Lorimer, 2013, p. 63; Hickey-Moody, 2013, p. 93). Other existing methodological research, for example, focuses on the role of affects in pedagogy and knowledge production (Springgay, 2011), as well as in citizenship development and political action (Roelvink, 2010); feminist media scholars have shown how affects such as disgust and hope play a dominant role in imaginary relations between bodies and images (Coleman, 2008, Coleman and Figueroa, 2010) and in doing so, reinvent overlooked methods such as Henri Bergson’s method of intuition (Coleman, 2008a).

The collection implicitly affirms Celia Lury and Nina Wakeford’s claim in Inventive Methods (2012) that ‘there is a need to (re)consider the relevance of method ... to the empirical investigation of the here and now, the contemporary …’ (Lury and Wakeford, 2012, p. 18) and to develop methods that ‘enable the happening of the social world – its ongoingness, relationality, contingency and sensuousness – to be investigated’ (ibid., p. 17; emphasis in original). Our answer to this challenge would be to clarify the type of knowledge about affect that we want to produce as cultural researchers, and to start thinking outside the box in terms of generating and analyzing material in new ways. Many of the established cultural research practices are too focused on content and structures of signification, with too little attention paid to reflecting inventively on where and how affect may be traced, approached and understood. We thus agree with the methodological goals regarding the contemporary academic interest in affect outlined by Lisa Blackman and Couze Venn in a 2010 issue of Body & Society. According to the authors, the goal is to develop new ways of being attentive to empirical material and develop ‘other ways of “noticing” and attending within our research endeavors’ (p. 9).

In this anthology, we take part in the endeavor of the abovementioned research, but also attempt to add a dimension; by focusing more on the ‘how’ of methods, our primary goal is thus to clarify the challenges we face when doing affect research, but also to suggest various strategies for dealing with these challenges. This collection thus aims to pragmatically and innovatively investigate and discuss possible ways of (1) asking research questions about affect, (2) generating ‘embodied data’ for qualitative affect research, and (3) identifying affective traces of processes in empirical material. Instead of being overwhelmed by the challenges, we argue that the development of methodologies for affect research should be regarded as an interesting zone of inventiveness, a zone raising reflections about what ‘the empirical’ produced tells us about the world and about the research setting, and a zone allowing us to generate new types of empirical material and perhaps to collect material that has previously been perceived as banal or unsophisticated (e.g., online comments, tag clouds, viewing statistics, notes, or accounts of the researcher’s bodily states).

After discussing the methodological challenges facing affect studies, we will reflect on three ‘meta-strategies’ for producing empirical material that are usable for investigating affect, based on the work presented in the chapters and on the growing amount of existing empirical research on affect. These meta-strategies are (1) the creation of inventive experimental milieus, (2) the rethinking of traditional fieldwork techniques such as observations and field notes, (3) the collection of often-overlooked forms of existing textual material or development of new approaches to texts and writing in order to grasp their affective dimensions. Along the way, we also discuss possible strategies for describing the presence of affectivity in relation to this material (e.g., via rhythm, ruptures, content, body language and assembling).

Defining the challenges of doing cultural research of affect

In contemporary cultural theory, ‘The solidity of the subject has dissolved into a concern with those processes, practices, sensations and affects that move through bodies in ways that are difficult to see, understand and investigate’, states Lisa Blackman (2012, p. viiii). After years of focusing on constructivist and discursive research paradigms, the need to understand what Scott Lash calls our increasingly ‘intensive’ culture – fuelled by the dissemination of global, hypercomplex and multisensual spaces, media and everyday practices (Lash, 2010) – has stimulated an array of affect research among cultural analysts. Since Michel Foucault and his analysis of power as ‘biopower’, the ‘bio’ has been at the center of interest, when it comes to investigating forms and strategies of control, domination, resistance and dislocations. The ‘affective turn’ represents both the urge to understand how, for example, bodies are targeted and strategically modulated affectively, and how they become empowered and mobilized socially and politically (Grusin, 2010; Protevi, 2009; Knudsen and Stage, 2012). This turn to affect and bodily intensity raises a range of methodological difficulties that we summarize as three main challenges – and thus not necessarily chronological phases or steps – that could be used to guide inventive attempts to empirically ground the study of affective processes.

Challenge I: asking questions and developing starting points

The first challenge is to develop a starting point or to ask a research question that can actually be approached and investigated through empirical material. According to Sara Ahmed, who uses ‘affect’ and ‘emotion’ more or less synonymously, one can detect ‘a significant “split” in theories of emotion in terms of whether emotions are tied primarily to bodily sensations or to cognition’ (2004, p. 7). Meanwhile prominent contemporary affect theorists such as Massumi, Thrift, Brennan and Clough, focus more on affect as an outside stimulation, somehow hitting first the body and then reaching the cognitive apparatus.¹ Another group, consisting of Ahmed herself, Ruth Leys, Margaret Wetherell, Judith Butler and Lisa Blackman, criticize the inherent dichotomies of mind and matter, body and cognition, biology and culture, the physical and psychological. The trajectory you choose in this field will of course also influence the type of material you need for your investigation and the identifiable phenomena that suggest the presence of affectivity in the material. Textual sources would, for example, need to be treated quite differently by the groups following the strategies outlined above. For supporters of the first group of researchers’ methods, affect is beyond language categorization, and therefore, any analytical strategy must focus on semantics and semiotics as distorted traces of affect, not a medium for it. For the second group, language would be considered capable of expressing affects, as there would be no inherent contradiction between the categories of language and the categories taking part in the social shaping of bodies, so they become emotionally sensitive to certain stimulations.

Most affect theorists (and theories), despite their disagreements on the epistemological and ontological nature of affect, agree that affects travel between (human and non-human) bodies and are experienced subjectively, and that they are often perceived as surprising or somehow beyond the will and conscious intentionality of the affected body. For that reason, we argue, research questions about affect become increasingly more answerable if they are concretely linked to specific bodies (for instance, the researcher’s own body) in specific (and empirically approachable) social contexts, as this makes it more likely that the researcher can actually collect/produce material that allows for empirically based argumentation. Asking research questions with a strong situational specificity is, in other words, the first necessary step towards empirically grounding the analysis of affective processes. In this edited collection, this challenge is for instance faced by involving the historical entanglements, hauntings and sensibilities of the ‘researcher-body’ as an important resource for grasping the affective qualities of a certain research topic (see e.g., the chapters of Blackman, To, Bøhling, Rytter, Trivelli and Gibbs).

This interest in ‘the situational’ is, in some sense, directed by our wish to not only get close enough to the actual affectivity of social life to sense and detect it, but also by our interest in knowledge production that transcends solely subjective accounts of affect. In stressing the academic knowledge potential of situational research, we thus follow Donna Haraway’s point that our goal as cultural researchers should be ‘better accounts of the world, that is, “science”’ and that cultural researchers should not oppose naive notions of a transparent reality open to objective knowledge production via the neutral gaze of the researcher with relativism or extreme subjectivism (Haraway, 1988, p. 590). Instead, the challenge, according to Haraway, is to simultaneously make an ‘account of radical historical contingency for all knowledge claims and knowing subjects, a critical practice for recognizing our own “semiotic technologies” for making meanings, and a no-nonsense commitment to faithful accounts of a “real” world’ (Haraway, 1988, p. 579). Haraway argues that focusing on localized and ‘situated knowledge’ could provide a way to simultaneously acknowledge the researchers’ intertwinement with the knowledge produced and the dimensions of the situation that are outside the researchers control – and therefore support the idea that ‘faithful knowledge can be imagined and can make claims on us’ (ibid., p. 593). ‘We are not in charge of the world’ (ibid., p. 594), as states Haraway, and for that reason, the world can also reveal itself in the situations we enter or set up as researchers. We do not create the world we investigate, according to Haraway, but establish a ‘conversation’ with it, which implies that we are, of course, part of – affecting and affected by – the research process, and that the situation can answer back and contribute to this interaction. To presume that everything in the situation is simply a product of the researchers’ own gaze or performative techniques would simply be megalomaniacal, according to Haraway.

How can we continue to acknowledge that methods and analytical devices matter for the results we find – and in this sense take a ‘post-positivist’ approach to methodology, as termed by Lisa Blackman in Chapter 2 – without falling in the trap of the researcher inventing the world? How can a post-positivist research agenda avoid both the pitfall of neutrality and of radical performativity? Perhaps a solution is to try to complicate the dichotomy between doing something to the world and investigating it. While setting up an academic experiment, we of course produce the world in certain ways, but the world may also reveal itself – or its capacity for change – to us during the performative research process. Lury and Wakeford define inventive methods in the following interesting way: ‘The inventiveness of methods is to be found in the relation between two moments: the addressing of a method – an anecdote, a probe, a category – to a specific problem, and the capacity of what emerges in the use of that method to change the problem’ (Lury and Wakeford, 2012, p. 7).

We consider this as an action-oriented research agenda, which aims to answer to problems through the methods deployed. Following the formulation, ‘changing the problem’ could be done by trying to actually intervene in social contexts: If one identifies a lack of compassion with excluded minorities as a problem, one has to produce the compassion via methodologically devices and not restrain oneself to just revealing it. On the other hand, the change could also be to create knowledge about problems, thereby changing the academic and/or public perception of the problem and perhaps our ability to intervene in new ways. In that way we propose that different methodologies can be positioned on an axis stretching from (1) action research methods using methods as devices to change or to be inventive in the world, to (2) methods focused more on understanding the social continuities and structures, which also characterize social life. In other words, methodologies, which are, of course, all performative or inventive to a certain degree, can be aimed at primarily creating discontinuities by introducing social change or at trying to grasp social continuities – or perhaps by working in a messy middle field between these two poles. We find both methodological approaches very valuable, and the c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1  Introduction: Affective Methodologies
• Part I  Inventive Experiments
• Part II  Embodied Fieldwork
• Part III  Textualities
• Index