Sensitive Objects: Affect & Material Culture (Nordic Academic Press Checkpoint) - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 9187675668 ISBN 13: 9789187675669

Publisher: Nordic Academic Press, 2016

Synopsis

Some objects stand out as personal and important to us. A packed suitcase, an inherited vase, the remains from a humanitarian aid package - things can induce affects. In this book the authors focus on material culture and on practice - on what affect does. Some of them place the issue of sensitivity in a wider from of professional interest in innovation and culture-tourism. The volume is a contribution to the upcoming field of affect research that has so far has been mainly explored psychology and cultural studies. In their texts the ethnologists and anthropologists involved show how established ways of analysing culture benefit from achievements in this field. They use fieldwork to examine how people project affects onto material objects and explore how objects trigger affects. The editors hope that this book will be read across disciplines, not only to promote the value of ethnographic work, but also to encourage theoretically informed creative empirical approaches to affect and material culture.

About this title

About the Author

Jonas Frykman is professor emeritus of European ethnology at the Department of Cultural Sciences, Lund University, Sweden. He co-edited this volume as professor II at Agderforskning, Kristiansand, Norway. His main research interests are culture and class, socialisation, body, memorials and phenomenological analysis of culture.

Maja Povrzanovic Frykman is professor of ethnology and teaches at the Department of Global Political Studies, Malmö University, Sweden. She is also acting as part-time senior researcher at Agderforskning, Kristiansand, Norway. Her main research interests are war-related experiences, diaspora and transnational practices, highly skilled migrants, place, ethnicity and material culture.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Sensitive Objects

Affect and Material Culture

By Jonas Frykman, Maja Povrzanovic Frykman

Nordic Academic Press

Copyright © 2016 Nordic Academic Press and the Authors
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-91-87675-66-9

Contents

Preface, 
1. Affect and Material Culture Perspectives and Strategies Jonas Frykman & Maja Povrzanovic Frykman, 
2. Moods and Emotions Some Philosophical Reflections on the 'Affective Turn' Nils Gilje, 
3. Ethnography and the Choices Posed by the 'Affective Turn' Stef Jansen, 
4. Sensitive Objects of Humanitarian Aid Corporeal Memories and Affective Continuities Maja Povrzanovic Frykman, 
5. The Titoaffect Tracing Objects and Memories of Socialism in Postsocialist Croatia Nevena Škrbic Alempijevic & Sanja Potkonjak, 
6. Emotional Baggage Unpacking the Suitcase Orvar Löfgren, 
7. Done by Inheritance A Phenomenological Approach to Affect and Material Culture Jonas Frykman, 
8. What Alters When the Traditional Sámi Costume Travels? A Study of Affective Investments in the Sápmi Britt Kramvig & Anne Britt Flemmen, 
9. In the Mood Place and Tools in the Music Industry with a Focus on Entrepreneurship Elisabet Sørfjorddal Hauge, 
10. Innovation and Embodiment in a Small Town Hotel Kirsti Mathiesen Hjemdahl & Jonas Frykman, 
11. The Performative Museum Designing a Total Experience Sarah Holst Kjær, 
12. Companion Pieces Written Through a Drift Lesley Stern & Kathleen Stewart, 
Contributors, 

CHAPTER 1

Affect and Material Culture

Perspectives and Strategies

Jonas Frykman & Maja Povrzanovic Frykman

Becoming attuned

At that wonderful concert you attended, did the music fill your body, did your feet dance uncontrollably and did your voice crackle in the sing-along with people you had never met before? Do you remember the sweet pain in your palms after applauding and the almost suffocating throng of bodies? Was the atmosphere uplifting? Did it encapsulate sounds, sights, smells, bodily sensations, and feelings simultaneously? What about the sudden feeling of power and togetherness when you took part in a demonstration, the sudden shouting and rush of blood to the head when your home team scored a goal?

By posing questions like this about the body, senses, feelings and atmosphere, we hope to attune readers to affect – the subject to which this book is devoted. We will look at how affects matter in general and, in particular, how they are related to the body, the environment, and things. This, we believe, is the contribution to which ethnology and anthropology are best suited, considering the changing yet persistent importance of material culture in these disciplines and of fieldwork for understanding the affective potentialities of objects.

Interdisciplinary studies of affect and emotion have produced 'a virtual explosion' of research and theoretical writings in the last decades, writes the psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett (2010: 203), who heads an interdisciplinary affective science laboratory. These studies are not only marked by differing and sometimes conflicting theoretical perspectives and research strategies – 'old debates continue to rage on' (ibid.), especially when body and language are concerned – but also lack a common scientific language that would enable 'an epistemologically objective scientific enterprise about something that is so ontologically subjective' (ibid.) and eludes 'conventional semiotic and semantic procedure' (Gibson 2013: 243). As always in academia, this dilemma is characteristic of perspectives that are in the process of breaking new ground. The fact that the words affect, emotion, feeling and sentiment are often used interchangeably makes dialogue across disciplinary borders difficult and confusing. Being a truly interdisciplinary field, genealogical influences are still clearly visible (Pellegrini and Puar 2009). Although definitions vary, the common keywords when describing affects seem to be intensity, contingency and potentiality.

A commoner way of approaching what affects stand for is found in the writings of geographer Ben Anderson, who reflects on 'affective atmospheres' and uses the vague term 'something' in many of his texts. To him, affective atmospheres express 'an ill-defined indefinite something, that exceeds rational explanation and clear figuration. Something that hesitates at the edge of the unsayable' (Anderson 2009: 78). Being 'at the edge' implies that they 'mix together narrative and signifying elements and non-narrative and asignifying elements' (ibid. 80). In line with our introductory questions about the atmosphere at a concert, Anderson (ibid. 77) reflects more on what such atmospheres do and less on what they are. Affective atmospheres 'may interrupt, perturb and haunt fixed persons, places or things' (ibid. 78). They are indeterminate with regard to the distinction between the subjective and objective and are 'impersonal in that they belong to collective situations and yet can be felt as intensely personal' (ibid. 80).

We claim that ethnographic research provides a fertile ground from which to capture the ambiguities of affective and emotive experience. For an ethnographer, that 'ill-defined indefinite something' is always related to particular people, places, situations and objects. Lingering momentarily with the examples of music and atmosphere, when Elisabet Hauge (Chapter 9) writes about the background of a successful Norwegian black metal band and its lead guitarist, she portrays a man whose music draws inspiration from his immediate material environment – a 'very sensuous interface of people, places and things' (Bille et al. 2015: 37). The old building housing 'The Mill' studio in his home village, its waterfall, the surrounding forest and the carefully scythed fields are all objects that put him 'in the mood', make him feel that there is 'something in the air' and inspire his compositions and performances. This 'mood' and this 'something' are not only physically experienced by him, but also by the other musicians, producers, record managers, volunteers and audiences, and contributes to an affective attunement to the world of metal music.

The effect of an atmosphere, as suggested above, is deeply personal and embodied, yet is hard to describe. When listening to music, we can feel the goose pimples on our skin and let our fingers snap to the rhythm. Music does not have to engage the mind's cognitive functions, but has the power to move our bodies and make us dance, jump and turn. A concert becomes 'a surface resonant with the rhythms of music, as well as of bodies, crowds, calendar events, trucks, heart rates, muscle contractions and more' (Clough 2010: 228, citing Henriques 2010). Music may fill us with joy or sadness. Regardless of which, it is almost always a mix of bodily motion, affect and emotion. The moment we engage in the scholarly practice of analysing such experiences and try to understand their history, symbolic significance and what they represent, their complexities are too easily reduced and the beat of the music – that 'something in the air' that affects us but is so hard to put into words – too easily lost.

Changing perspectives on affect

Nils Gilje (Chapter 2) states that, by definition, affect deals with the pre-theoretical conception of the world. He sees the present interest in the field as linked to how a cognitive bias has left whole territories of human life uncharted, where moods and emotions are largely omitted from an understanding of the human condition. But this turn to affect is not new, as the two professors of gender studies, Ann Pellegrini and Jasbir Puar, indicate:

What some have hailed as a recent 'affective turn' in fact draws across older formations of sentiment studies; theories of emotion; 'structures of feeling' (to invoke Raymond Williams's oft-cited formulation); the work of Gottfried Leibniz, Baruch Spinoza, Henri Bergson, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others; and science and technology studies. Thus, what appears to be a 'new' critical, conceptual lens that has gained significant intellectual and scholarly cachet in the last decade is in fact indebted to multiple, and often contradictory, genealogical threads. (Pellegrini and Puar 2009: 36)

When Gilje traces the fate of affects and emotions back through the history of Western philosophy he ends up with Spinoza, who, unlike Descartes, could not accept that human consciousness was independent of the body and free from the intensity of affects. But Gilje does something more than trace these intellectual forefathers. By going back to the fifteenth century philosopher Giovanni Pico della Mirandola and forwards to Søren Kierkegaard and the phenomenologists of the twentieth century, he hints at the occurrence and recurrence of the same theme at times of major social change and development. The most elaborate philosophical discussions of mood, attunement and affect are to be found at turning points like the Rennaissance, the Scientific Revolution, Romanticism and the decisive years around the first World War.

The novelty of this particular 'turn' is that it follows a general questioning of theory in the humanities and social sciences, and especially in cultural studies and critical theory. For instance, the focus on texts becomes less prominent than the emphasis on readers' affective responses. In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg (2010) list no fewer than eight main approaches to affect, among which the phenomenological and postphenomenological approaches are the most influential. What they see as a clear humanities-related approach is a diverse attempt to 'turn away from the linguistic turn and its attendant social constructionisms' (ibid. 7). They note that the research within this approach focuses on 'those ethico-aesthetic spaces that are opened up (or shut down) by a widely disparate assortment of affective encounters' (ibid. 8).

Deriving from the Latin afficere, the word affect implies passivity, in that it means 'to have had something done to one'. The general agreement is that affect encompasses the various capacities of bodies to affect and be affected, and that it therefore refers to forces and intensities that are visceral (see Cichosz 2014: 56). Hence, the interest in affect in the first place involves a focus on bodies and embodiment, on 'the very fabric of the body and those forms of embodied experience that often remain unseen, unnoticed and unrecognised' (Åhäll and Gregory 2015b: 5). By introducing 'an empiricism of sensation' (Clough 2010: 224) into the social sciences and the humanities, affect studies 'intensified the difference or differance of subjectivity and the human body while turning attention to the sociality of the transmission of force or intensity across bodies, and not only human bodies' (ibid.), thereby including non-humans in the study of affects.

Seigworth and Gregg (2010: 8) see the effort to understand the working of affect as 'how the "outside" realms of the pre-/extra-/para-linguistic intersect with the "lower" or proximal senses (such as touch, taste, smell, rhythm and motion- sense, or, alternately/ultimately, the autonomic nervous system)'. Philosophical inquiries into bioscience suggest that affect is 'both a "precognitive" attribute (not in terms of a telos, but in terms of a quality) of the body as well as emotion's trace effect' (Pellegrini and Puar 2009: 37). Such a conception of affect implies a distinction between sensation and the perception of that sensation: 'Affect, from this perspective, is precisely what allows the body to be an open system, always in concert with its virtuality, the potential of becoming' (ibid.). Affect may therefore 'anchor claims about the materiality of bodies and physiological processes that are not contained or representable by language or cognition alone' (ibid.).

However, the idea that affect can be analysed as a 'precognitive' phenomenon has been criticised by scholars such as Margaret Wetherell, a professor of social psychology who finds the idea that our bodies are shaped by an outer force prior to sensemaking unsustainable: 'we cannot create a split between a semi-conscious, automaton-like, reactive body and the reflexive, discursive, interpreting, meaning-making, communicating social actor' (Wetherell 2015a: 160). In line with recent neuroscience and psychobiology research, Wetherell advocates an analysis that 'does not presume a strongly, pre-organized, built-in set of innate affect programs' (ibid.). She sees affective practice as 'a moment of recruitment, articulation or enlistment when many complicated flows across bodies, subjectivities, relations, histories and contexts entangle and intertwine together to form just this affective moment, episode or atmosphere with its particular possible classifications' (ibid.).

The affect studies pioneer, Brian Massumi, claims that affects works synesthetically, which 'implies a participation of the senses in each other' (1995: 96). The simultaneous activation of senses such as taste, smell and touch has often been mentioned by scholars of affect (see e.g. Highmore 2010). This 'dismisses any hierarchical separation between soma and matter' (Boscagli 2014: 4). For instance, when Povrzanovic Frykman (Chapter 4) writes about how memories of humanitarian aid are triggered by specific objects, it is clear that people's physical reactions are activated by the sensations of taste, smell, sound and touch. The synesthetic quality of affects can also be used to set the stage for a total experience, something that is of particular importance to Hauge's analysis (Chapter 9) of the concerts at 'The Mill'. Here, the black metal concerts are intertwined with a material surrounding that includes good food, the aroma of newly mown meadows, and torchlight illuminating the darkness of night.

Affect and emotion

Affect and emotion are often paired up in the literature. However, invoking one or the other 'has come to signal a basic orientation to the self, world and their interrelation (as well as in some cases a particular politics and ethics)' (Anderson 2009: 80). Scholars who agree that affects precede conscious knowing place it beyond emotions depending on how culturally defined the emotions seem to be. Massumi (1995: 86) defines affect as 'a state of suspense, potentially of disruption', expressed through an array of physiological reactions (muscular contraction, secretions) and visible symptoms (voice changes, facial expressions). Emotion, on the other hand, is 'the socio-linguistic fixing of the quality of an experience which is from that point onward defined as personal' (ibid. 88).

In Nigel Thrift's words, affects refer to 'complex, self-referential states of being', whereas emotions are 'cultural interpretations' of affects, culturally constructed 'everyday understandings of affects' that have a distinctive vocabulary and serve as a means of relating to others (Thrift 2008: 221). As summarised by Anderson (2009: 80),

the distinction between affect and emotion has been caught up in the subjective/objective problematic via two oppositions: narrative/ non-narrative and semiotic/asignifying. The terms have fallen on one or the other of those divides – affect with non-narrative and asignifying and emotion with narrative and semiotic. Affect with the impersonal and objective. Emotion with the personal and subjective.

While 'the emotions of anger, regret, jealousy or empathy, are best communicated by describing the personal circumstances and sociocultural context of their staging' (Henriques 2010: 82; see also Bendix 2015), affects have 'the kind of significance that has to be embodied, felt and experienced' (ibid.). Affects are often equated with 'intensities' (Massumi 1995; Stewart 2007). Emotion, then, is 'qualified intensity', 'intensity owned and recognized' (Massumi (1995: 88). For Massumi, a linguistic expression that 'qualifies' is not simply in opposition to intensity: 'The relationship between the levels of intensity and qualification is not one of conformity or correspondence, but of resonation or interference, amplification or dampening' (ibid.). However, 'matter-of-factness dampens intensity' (ibid. 86).

This 'dampening of intensity' raises significant questions about the methodology of studying affect in the frames of ethnographic research. What happens when affects are 'translated' as representations? What happens to affect in the process of narration? In psychology, theorising about affects is based on controlled observations of physical reactions, often in experimental situations where expressions, movements and utterances can be registered in a systematic way. But in several chapters of this book we are faced with interviews, memories and recollections of significant events that are narratively framed, and thus by definition stand out as emotions or a mix of affect and emotion. It is therefore of crucial importance to explore how the cognitively defined emotions that are encountered in interviews can be used to investigate affective states. In Povrzanovic Frykman's contribution (Chapter 4) we see this dilemma drawn to its extreme. Corporeal memories of war are narrated two decades after the events took place. As a researcher she was not even present at most of the interviews. So how can she possibly grasp the multilayered affective reactions that took place in the interview situations? We have to qualify the background given so far by discussing some of the basic features of contemporary approaches to analysing affect.

The problem of naming

The power that resides in the affect perspective is to be found in what it promises to open up. Kathleen Stewart (2007) consistently refers to 'forces' and 'intensities' as a vague 'something'. If nothing is defined, there is a strong potential for something new and unexpected to take place: 'Once captured in the content nets of specific emotions, affects lose their capacity for movement and change' (Cichosz 2014: 56). Massumi also claims that any definition 'annuls the potential' and 'turns formless affective expression into content, such as a discernible emotion' (ibid.). The moment we name/define affect we choose how to deal with it and probably engage in a culturally appropriate emotional reaction.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Nordic Academic Press
• Publication date: 2016
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 9187675668
• ISBN 13: 9789187675669
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 285
• Editor: Frykman Jonas