Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present

Laurajane Smith, Margaret Wetherell, Gary Campbell, Laurajane Smith, Margaret Wetherell, Gary Campbell

• Verlag: Routledge
• Jahr: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351250948
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Arte
• Thema: Studi museali

Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present is a response to debates in the humanities and social sciences about the use of emotion. This timely and unique book explores the ways emotion is embroiled and used in contemporary engagements with the past, particularly in contexts such as heritage sites, museums, commemorations, political rhetoric and ideology, debates over issues of social memory, and touristic uses of heritage sites.

Including contributions from academics and practitioners in a range of countries, the book reviews significant and conflicting academic debates on the nature and expression of affect and emotion. As a whole, the book makes an argument for a pragmatic understanding of affect and, in doing so, outlines Wetherell's concept of affective practice, a concept utilised in most of the chapters in this book. Since debates about affect and emotion can often be confusing and abstract, the book aims to clarify these debates and, through the use of case studies, draw out their implications for theory and practice within heritage and museum studies.

Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present should be essential reading for students, academics, and professionals in the fields of heritage and museum studies. The book will also be of interest to those in other disciplines, such as social psychology, education, archaeology, tourism studies, cultural studies, media studies, anthropology, sociology, and history.

Chapter 1

Introduction

Affective heritage practices

Margaret Wetherell, Laurajane Smith and Gary Campbell

Introduction

Although a consensus is emerging around the importance of emotion in constituting heritage, dilemmas about how to theorise and investigate affect are much less resolved. Emotion is everywhere – in the curl of a lip and a shrug of the shoulders at an exhibition of slavery, it is there in the will to commemorate and curate, in stifled sobs at remembrance ceremonies, in fired-up family genealogists, commitments to nationalism, the discomfort felt as tightly held assumptions are questioned, and in the sticky patina of fingerprints on popular glass cases in museums. Emotion is pervasive, but it is also difficult to think about, and in particular it is challenging to develop viable interdisciplinary perspectives that can recognise emotion’s psychobiological groundings while exploring its social organisation. Emotion, feeling and affect are also difficult to define. Traditionally, affect is the more generic term, highlighting the embodied state and the initial registering of events in bodies and minds. Feeling refers to qualia and the subjective phenomenological experience, while emotion refers to the processing and packaging of affect in familiar cultural categories such as anger, grief, schadenfreude, etc. But even these conventional distinctions and definitions raise issues. They seem to suggest a kind of dubious chronology, for instance affect first and emotion second, or bodies first and the making of meaning second, when the initial registering and the generative processes of affect/emotion are always already embodied and semiotic. Affect and emotion are flowing, dynamic, recursive and profoundly contextual, challenging static and neat formulations.

It is perhaps enough to say that the contributors to this volume¹ are interested in phenomena that have some psychological presence, involving mild to strong degrees of turbulence in bodies and minds. We are all interested in the fact that emotion is action-oriented; it pushes people to do things. We value Margaret Archer’s (2000, 2007) observation that emotions are part of commentaries on things that are important to us, a point also elaborated by Sayer (2005). Emotions are a form of evaluative judgement, inextricably linked to cognition, sometimes consciously so, or sometimes non-conscious and drawing on the neurological reinforcements of prior experience and learning (Marcus, Neuman and MacKuen 2000; see also Prinz 2004). Crucially for heritage studies and critical social research, emotion is also historically and culturally contingent, and bound up in power relations and politics. These formulations are strong starting places to begin thinking about what is it that emotion and affect actually do in heritage and museum contexts. How might an emphasis on emotion encourage new questions, or answer old ones in useful ways?

We suggest that attention to emotion and affect allows us to deepen our understanding of how people develop attachments and commitments to the past, things, beliefs, places, traditions and institutions. At the same time focusing on emotion can reveal the fractures and tensions that are both emotionally and discursively worked out as people reconsider and reassess their attachments to what was once common sense to them. Additionally, this focus can reveal the nuances of how people negotiate various forms of identity, sense of social and physical place, and feelings of wellbeing and discomfort. However, for a focus on emotion to achieve this, it is vital that the theorising of emotion be pragmatic, and at its core it must ask what it is that emotions do, and are used for; and we believe that this needs to start from a focus on performance and practice. To that end, we asked the authors in this volume to explore the ways that emotions are put to use when the past is mobilised as ‘heritage’ in the present.

Affective practice

Here we briefly overview the path that led us to privilege the notion of affective practice as a basis for critical social research. In part, this was a response to the problems we see with three current, popular formulations of emotion. One is the phenomenological emphasis on feelings per se; the second is the conventional Western set of assumptions about the psychology of emotion, which are often just taken for granted when heritage and museum studies researchers begin to notice affect; and the third is recent work in cultural studies which sets up affect as a kind of excess and formed intensity, a product of spaces and relations, hitting human bodies in an unmediated way.

The phenomenological approach, with its focus on subjectively experienced gradients and bursts of affects, is rich in detail and can be a stimulating starting point, and people’s experiences in the course of a heritage encounter are often illuminating, strange and impressively articulated. But where should one go from here? As Bourdieu (1990) argues, the broad problem with social phenomenology is the difficulty in moving to a systematic and insightful reckoning of the conditions of possibility for social action. In this case, how is emotion assembled, what is required for feeling to arise, and how do we make sense of affective privilege and differential access? Rich detail can obscure collective patterning, context and location. The reach of the idiosyncratic remains unclear, as does how affect communicates, travels and potentially mobilises.

A second common standpoint in social research on emotion is to assume that traditional twentieth-century Western psychologies can be trusted to ground investigation. It is frequently naively taken for granted, for example, that emotion comes in discrete basic packets, templates or programmes, each with its own embodied signature or brain/body routine (grief, joy, anger etc.); that it is obvious these are human universals shared with animals and dating from early human history; that emotion, as distinct from cognition, can be treated as a spontaneous, automatic, authentic and unmediated response direct from the body/brain if not the heart; that emotions express rather than construct body states, goals and positions; and that there are fixed cause–effect relationships between defined environmental triggers and specific emotions so that the right stimulus will set off a particular emotion programme like anger, just as surely as pressing a key generates a software routine.

The problems with these assumptions for social research have been well rehearsed (e.g. Leys 2011; Wetherell 2012, 2015). Curiously, although it has rarely been explored by social researchers, contemporary mainstream thinking about emotion in experimental psychobiology develops an analysis which in many ways is highly amenable to critical social science (Barrett 2006, 2009; Russell 2003, 2009; Scherer 2009). The surprising lack of empirical evidence over a number of decades for the seemingly obvious, traditional ‘basic emotions’ view has led many psychobiologists to advocate psychological constructionism in its place. The embodied prod of sensation is now understood as a registration of the state of physiological core affect in terms of valence (positive or negative) and intensity (strong or weak). The process of ‘reading’ or registering core affect, however, simultaneously weaves together with meaning-making to produce dynamic flows of feelings, experiences and actions that are culturally recognisable (and communicable to oneself and others) as types of affect and emotion. As Klaus Scherer (2005: 314) describes, a burst of affect involves the synchronous recruitment of mental and somatic resources and, others would add, this recruitment is thus not the expression of an underlying basic emotion programme but a flexible, contextual, contingent and ongoing construction and assembling of bodily sensations, events, meanings and consequences. For heritage and museum studies researchers this disrupts any simple notion that an emotion expresses a natural and authentic reactive truth, that a heritage event will trigger a matching, singular, unequivocal emotion in its audience so that the event can be read to decode the emotion it must inevitably trigger, and the implicit assumption that emotions ‘speak English’ so that contemporary English-language emotion categories can be treated as basic universals for all peoples in all periods and places (Wierzbicka 1999).

The third strand of thinking about affect which we have not found so helpful (although it has been more so for some contributors to this volume) is the new emphasis on affect in cultural studies and cultural geography as a kind of unmediated intensity or excess. This is often traced back to Massumi’s (2002) reading of Deleuze and Bergson, among others. Anderson (2009, see also 2006) articulates this view clearly in his work on affective atmospheres. In this account, for example, affect acts as a kind of extra-discursive excess mysteriously imbuing spaces and places – they acquire an atmosphere and affecting powers – which are then assumed to automatically organise and charge those who pass through this space. Anderson is interested in ‘… a class of experience that occurs before and alongside the formation of subjectivity, across human and non-human materialities, and in-between subject/object distinctions’ (Anderson 2009: 78). Theorists in this particular ‘turn to affect’ explore processes of contagion, the viral and communal affect. Crowds and so-called crowd minds (Brennan 2004) become key exemplars, along with the ways in which lines of affect might be laid down or engineered in cities (Thrift 2004), so that the simple experience of city walking becomes an experience of being unavoidably assailed and hailed by affect. Thrift (2008) likens groups of humans to schools of fish, for example. He suggests that affect, channelled through automatic unconscious imitation and pheromones, travels rapidly from body to body, beyond discursive mediation, so that scenes begin to pulse with collective emotion.

Undoubtedly, these emphases have been productive in the ways they have drawn attention to the intersections of emotion, history and geography, and in particular the connections between the organisation of space and emotion potentials and available trajectories. They also usefully remind us that affect is a distributed phenomenon – not something that can be localised in the psychological individual alone, but demanding a level of analysis involving the episode, the broader articulation, the assemblage, historical contexts and previous affective patterns. But what is missing here is any account of the practical human work and meaning-making involved in this assemblage. Complex, feeling social actors become simple affect automatons. What becomes particularly mysterious in this account is any failure in affective transmission. Why, for example, do visitors to a museum exhibition of difficult history have such diverse responses, why do some members of a crowd resist its pull and affect? To understand this, we need to explore the ways in which participants are making meaning of the situation, patterns of identification and affiliation, and the role of previous histories of sense-making in setting up the resonances of any potentially affecting scene. These meaning-making activities, we suggest, massively exceed the role of any passive unconscious entraining of bodies and set the stage for imitation. They are crucial for understanding the constitution and recruitment of the past in the present.

What, then, does thinking about affect and emotion through the concept of practice offer as an alternative? Practice social theories have been around since the 1970s. They were devised to understand the core conundrums of human action, the re-instantiation and the new creation of social life, the regulated but only partially determined nature of human conduct, the problems involved in understanding the formation of social actors, what is internalized and what inheres. As Ortner (2006) notes, practice theories vary from the more deterministic (Bourdieu 1990) to the more agentic (Giddens 1979). Their relevance for questions around the social organisation of subjectivity, and specifically affect and emotion, is obvious (Wetherell 2008), but, for a variety of reasons to do with the disciplinary histories of psychology and social theory, are not often investigated. The time seems to have come, however, for re-invigorating social research on emotion through practice-based research, and a number of emerging cognate lines of inquiry can be found in critical social psychology (Brown and Stenner 2009; Cromby 2015; Walkerdine 2010; Wetherell 2012, 2013a, 2015), in sociology (Burkitt 2014; Reckwitz 2002, 2012), in history (Reddy 2001, 2009; Scheer 2012), and in geography (Everts and Wagner 2012; Laurier and Philo 2006). Despite a difference in meta-theory (Wetherell 2015), there are clear synergies too with Ahmed’s (2004) important work on the cultural politics of emotion.

The notion of affective practice is not intended as a total theory of all affect and emotion. Rather it draws attention to a type of affect and emotion that is regular if not necessarily always routine, relatively predictably ordered and patterned (but with a could-be-otherwise quality), socially consequential and bound up with ongoing social relations. In other words, it concerns the kind of affect that is probably most to the fore in the investigations of heritage and museum studies scholars. Social researchers investigate social practices of grooming, cooking, sport, games and leisure, and explore communities of practice; in a similar vein we might attend to the organisation of affective practices such as righteous indignation on Twitter, communities of practice based on banter and their affects and subject positions, the affective practices which organise institutionalised emotional labour such as handling irate customers in call centres, or the ways in which those participating in a commemorative event move through the affecting possibilities set up by the music and speeches. Every social practice involves some kind of affect (even if that is just boredom and indifference, or just enough investment or fear to keep participants enacting); what marks out affective practice from general social practice, however, is that this is human activity where emotion is a specific and principal focus of the practice.

As Schatzki (2002) points out, a social practice is ‘a nexus of doings and sayings’. As a consequence, we suggest that the kinds of discourse activities (formulating, accounting and narrating) that are the unavoidable and inevitable focus of most qualitative research offer a way in to important features of affective practices such as retrospective sense-making around emotion epsiodes, the cultural resources available to mediate affect, and the subject and identity positioning process, but...