Abstract
In 1992, Margaret Wetherell together with Jonathan Potter published the groundbreaking book Mapping the Language of Racism where she and Potter made issues of discursive psychology applicable for a huge number of students and researchers in many countries, who were beginning to grapple with the new concepts and with the consequences of a discursive turn for empirical work in the psy-sciences. Twenty years after this book, Wetherell is again a first and original adapter of, and contributor to, new and innovative theories of relevance to feminist studies and in particular psycho-social research. In her new book, Affect and Emotion: A New Social Science Understanding, Wetherell offers a sustained engagement with the affective turn (Clough, 2007), starting from the eye-opening introduction ‘Shame in the cybernetic fold: Reading Silvan Tomkins’ in Shame and its Sisters by Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (1995) and Brian Massumi’s (2002) Parables for the Virtual.
My point of social psychological departure and epistemological ambition resonates with Wetherell’s. It involves a genuine interest in analysing everyday life and human practices. After years of puzzling about how to do research on the entanglement of affective psy-management and the formation of subjectivities, I couldn’t resist the invitation to think along the lines of Wetherell’s question: How can we engage with phenomena that can be read simultaneously as somatic, neural, subjective, historical, social and personal? ‘Why not follow Wetherell in her endeavours with affect and her ways of inviting the energetic, the physical, and the sensual back into the social sciences?’, I asked my colleague Malou Juelskjær. In order to do just that, we invited 30 MA students to engage with the universe of affectivity and its theorists through Wetherell’s framework and her thought provoking questions during the autumn of 2012. So, where did Wetherell leave us and the 30 students in understanding affectivity, and how could her framework assist us in analysing new forms of psy-management, where emotions, ethos and senses are the targets of new management processes in education (Staunæs, 2011)? Or, in other words, what does Wetherell offer us, and what can we do with this kind of knowledge?
Wetherell aims to invent a more systematic, cross-disciplinary framework for conceptualizing affects that is rooted in social psychology. She argues that it is too simplifying to say that affects are only about being moved or affected and that much written under the headline of the affective turn is either unsystematic, uncritical cherry-picking from existing work – often with a pretty shaky neuroscientific ground – or a ‘find one great theorist of the past strategy’ (p. 10) as for instance the newly rediscovered William James or Silvan Tomkins. Wetherell identifies three lines of fruitful approaches to affects and three lines that constitute dead ends. Fruitful approaches enable us to grasp affects as flowing activity, as patterns or more precisely assemblages, in which affects are composed, figured, entangled, mobilized and recruited. These approaches include issues of power, value and capital. The wrong turns, on the other hand, make artificial divides between basic emotions and social constructions, ‘rubbish’ discourse and celebrate the uncanny, Wetherell argues.
The backbone of Wetherell’s framework (the right turn?) is the concept of practice derived from her eclectic reading of Deleuze, Bourdieu, Butler, Ortner and Heritage and, particularly, Valerie Walkerdine’s concept of affective practice: ‘I will be arguing that … affective practices offers the most productive way of understanding the passing of affect from one to another, forming what can be seen like pulses of energetic relation’ (p. 142). Affective practices are moments of recruitment. It is the participation of the emoting body that makes an assemblage of affect rather than an example of some other kind of social practice. Recruiting is onto-formative: it constitutes object and subject. Affects need to be located in actual bodies and social actors and not to be mysterious circulations. The concept of affective practice encompasses the movement of signs but it also tries to explain how affect is embodied, situated and operates psychologically.
After staging her lines of argumentation on affectivity and the privileging of the concept of affective practice, the book reviews and discusses six important issues and the paradigms associated with these themes: How affects are embodied through affective flows and their psychobiological figuring (Chapter 2); How affects are negotiated though discourse, representation and affective meaning making (Chapter 3); How affects are situated through interaction, accountability and the present moment (Chapter 4); How affects are solidified through structures of feeling, habitus and emotional capital (Chapter 5); How affects may be personalized through relational histories, subjectivities and the psycho-social (Chapter 6); and how affects are circulated through waves of feeling, contagion and transmission (Chapter 7).
Throughout the book, Wetherell reviews, discusses, follows and breaks with other former and contemporary affective turns. For instance, she breaks with the turns conceptualizing the affective as a way of escaping a divide between human and non-human and indeterminate affect and determinate emotion. According to Wetherell, this turn privileges the non-human and the autonomy of affect and thereby bypasses subjectivity and leaves us with nothing but mystifying answers. Wetherell confesses that, at least for the purposes of this book, she is not interested in non-human affects. On the contrary, Wetherell continues the growing British and Scandinavian social psychological discussion on how to conceptualize the affective formation of human subjectivities without making sovereign persons the final point of reference.
Many of our students found Wetherell’s book extremely difficult. Their intellectual histories do not include all the different texts and discussions Wetherell reviews. Others thought, that with a little help from their professors, it was a good introduction for equipping them to map the various affective turns and their main questions/ambitions and traces.
We all agreed that we were absolutely inspired and thought-provoked by sharp questions like: ‘What are the limits of affective transmission or the boundaries of affective contagion? Why is not everything always transmitted?’ (p. 142), ‘What goes awry when bodily responses and discourse melded together in practice are pulled apart in theory?’ (p. 53) or when for instance highly partial readings of philosophy are combined with highly selected bits of neuroscience? (p. 54). We found her argument about how new psycho-biological accounts are consistent with notions of patterning found in the concepts of affective practice especially interesting. Equally, we loved the idea that the new neuroscience resonates with social psychology in that it is the social side of formatting neurons and matter (p. 27) and that older social constructionist analyses may incorporate the body/brain and thereby transgress empty statements of embodiment while still being systematic and consistent in rethinking these intersections. We do, however, doubt that Thrift’s more-than-humans-perspective necessarily goes beyond human beings, but do agree that his focus is not human beings and that’s why further elaboration needs to be developed, if a social psychologist is to take his or her affective turn.
In addition to her critique of the ‘wrong turns’, Wetherell points out how Brian Massumi’s very popular account of existing critical cultural studies is a caricature and rarely includes understanding of social psychological discourse analysis (p. 56). The problem is, Wetherell argues, that Massumi neglects any link between affect and meaning-making and, in addition, defines discourse in the narrowest possible way, treats affects as autonomous, privileges the body and reinvents positivistic psychology as scientific knowledge, or as Wetherell writes: ‘As a psychologist, I find it odd to read these accounts, and to see scholars from disciplines previously so critical of positivistic psychology uncritically reproducing some of the staples from undergraduate textbooks, with none of the contestations over their meaning and significance’ (p. 57).
We agree with Wetherell about the tendencies to caricature and the peculiar reception of positivistic psychology in former areas of critical study. We would, however, ask her not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Where does it leave us if we skip the idea, that there may be ‘excess’? And what could we enable ourselves to know if we analytically could differentiate between affect (as something more stable and more discursive) and affectivity as just intensity, less discursive? And what kind of human worlds would we get access to if we hybridized these approaches in a frictional analysis moving between the stable and the fluid (as suggested by for instance Jaspir Puar, 2012). And finally, what would happen to our knowledge production if we accepted that rhythms and tones of non-human features affect humans and may again be transmitted into particular feelings such as joy, fear? Is it possible with Wetherell’s text in hand to understand for instance how new technologies, architecture, animals or just governmental strategies are radically affecting human beings or is it mainly the interaction between human creatures that her approach helps us to understand?
What does the book help us to know and think? Where does she transgress her previous ideas from ‘Mapping the language of racism’? How do her methods support our ambitions to interrogate the affective life of educational organizations and our search for affective methodologies? What tools does she give us for opening up new worlds? And where did she leave us affectively? In a funny sense the affective practices used in writing the text were transmitted to our students. The writing style is quite affective. Wetherell’s reading of other affective turns is not conducted in a hopeful or reparative manner. She conducts her business as rather sceptical reading, using several discursive techniques to construct negative affects concerning the wrong turns, the ‘rubbishing of discourse’ and how psychology becomes colonized by other disciplines such as geography, media studies and political science. But affectivity is always unpredictably labile and the book’s anger towards the wrong turns metamorphosed into frustration about Wetherell. The students switched suddenly into opposition to Wetherell rather than to the ‘wrong turners’. This is a shame because the thoroughness and the pertinent questions of this book make a great companionship into the turn to affect.
Finally, the book would have benefited from a broader corpus of data. It has only interview transcripts. It could have been interesting if the book had experimented with different kinds of data material (pictures, moves, observations, etc.) involving more senses and modalities and curiously had experimented with whatever affective terminology and methodology would be needed. Would non-human or post-human concepts of affectivity then have been invited into ‘the right turns’?