One turn … and now another one: Do the turn to practice and the turn to affect have something in common?

Abstract

The turn to practice has been prominent in the community of Management Learning and still occupies an important place in the debate that approaches practice from the standpoint of learning and knowing. On considering how the turn to practice contributes to the ongoing conversation on post-epistemologies, one notes a convergence with another ‘turn’. The turn to affect started more or less in the same years as the turn to practice, but the conversation between the two has not yet been fully articulated. I argue that both share a concern for (1) a relational epistemology, (2) the body and (3) sociomateriality. To show how they may interact, three vignettes are presented to illustrate their commonalities and how they try to produce in the reader an affective reaction. This article is also the outcome of an experimentation conducted with a visual writer during the Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference in Milan, and it proposes a reflection on the limits of representationalism.

Keywords

Affect affective computing atmosphere Bill Viola practice representationalism

Introduction

In what follows, I shall put into written words the talk that I gave at the Organizational Learning, Knowledge and Capabilities conference in Milan in 2015. The theme of the conference was ‘Authors in practices, practical authorship’, and following the spirit of the theme, the organizers offered me the opportunity to be accompanied by a visual writer – Sara Seravalle – who was ‘translating’ my words into drawings (Picture 1). The aim of this experimental collaboration was to perform an affective experience for the audience, based on the assumption that ‘you know it when you see it’. Visual writing is the language of stories, a language that translates a vision of a potential reality, including settings, events, passions and dialogue, into aesthetics, movement and dramatic action. Visual writing is characterized by the construction of dramatic action so that the audience visualizes the ongoing experience, and it projects dramatic action primarily from the experience of the listener and secondarily from the writer. It should be considered that while I was giving my speech, another co-author was working beside me using a visual language. In my speech, I also used photographs and a video, and in the photographs that follow the reader can see how Sara was working, while my speech was going on. Nevertheless, this article cannot reproduce the experience of ‘being there’, and in writing it, a mediation with another language – the written one – is under way.

Picture 1.

Sara, the visual writer, at work.

I was encouraged by Ann Cunliffe and the editors of the journal to take up the challenge to produce ‘a performative text’, and this article is the outcome of this process of translations. It is not only a ‘written’ text, nor are the images that appear in it simple illustrations of written words. Its aim is to give an answer to the rhetorical question posed in the title, thus the turn to affect is presented on the background of the turn to practice. At the same time, it is also an experiment in writing/reading since it encourage the readers ‘to step into the text’ and to immerse themselves in the affective atmospheres that the three vignettes aim to elicit. The language of the article is meant to change while the reader proceeds in the reading.

The turn to practice from the standpoint of learning and knowing

The literature on practice by the authors who belong to the Management Learning community has contributed a specific way of framing and engaging with the concept of practice since the beginning of the so-called practice turn, if not before its diffusion (Easterby-Smith et al., 1998). What is distinctive of this community in how it takes the turn to practice is the connection between practice and knowing and learning (Elkjaer, 2004). One reason for adopting the concept of practice in this way was the attempt to move away from both a cognitive understanding of learning and a commodification of knowledge in the form of an object that can be transferred and exchanged. Therefore, the rediscovery of practice (as a philosophical and sociological concept with a long tradition) was a way to approach learning as competent participation in social and working practices and knowing as a collective activity situated in practices. The motivation for approaching practices – from this standpoint – was to define practice as a collective knowledgeable doing.

We can identify the beginning of the turn to practice from the standpoint of learning and knowing in three journal Special Issues, two of which appeared in 2000 and the third in 2009.

The first was a Special Issue of Organization, entitled ‘Practice-based Theorizing on Learning and Knowing in Organizations’ (Gherardi, 2000) in which a conversation was established between four streams of research somehow connected to the concept of practice and situated knowledge (cultural and aesthetic approach, situated learning theory, activity theory and actor–network theory).

The second was a Special Issue of Journal of Management Studies, on ‘Organizational Learning: Debates Past, Present and Future’, edited by Mark Easterby-Smith et al. (2000). The contributions of this Special Issue were selected on the basis of the papers submitted to the third International Conference on Organizational Learning held at Lancaster University in June 1999. In regard to future studies in the field, the editors wrote about a ‘quiet revolution’, that is, a shift from an ‘epistemology of possession’ to one of ‘practice’ with respect to the themes of knowledge and knowing. They noted that

the units of analysis, which figure ever more often in papers and studies, open unexplored ways to understand the process through which identities, artefacts, ideologies, rules, language, morality, and interests are woven together and affect each other in the process of collective learning. (Easterby-Smith et al., 2000: 788)

From their words, we can understand how, from the outset, the idea of practice was situated within a processual thinking and linked to the image of practice elements woven together. Moreover, in their introduction, the editors also stressed that ‘many of these developments point towards a new regard for the issues of power, politics and trust’.

Nine years later, the third Special Issue (Gherardi, 2009) appeared in Management Learning and was titled ‘The Critical Power of the Practice Lens’. It voiced a concern about the ‘practice turn’, since the greater diffusion and acceptance of the term ‘practice’ has been accompanied by the loss of critical power of the practice concept in favour of more orthodox accounts shaped by assumptions of rationalism and cognitivism in organization studies. In fact, we often find the term ‘practice’ is assumed to be synonymous with ‘routine’, or taken to be a generic equivalent of ‘what people really do’, without addressing the link between practice and knowledge, its original and distinctive critique of the modernist conceptions of knowledge (i.e. practice as the generative source of knowledge) and the methodological problems that its use implies. The link between power and knowledge (Contu, 2014) was a major concern from the standpoint of learning and knowing in practice. On the basis of these three first contributions to the literature on practice studies that developed from 2000 onwards, I shall delineate the specificity of this approach to practice and position it within the ‘bandwagon’ of practice-based studies (Corradi et al., 2010). Therefore, when I write about the turn to practice and explore what it has in common with the turn to affect, I shall refer to a concept of practice as outlined above, without entering into detailed discussion of the several streams of research within practice-based studies.¹

To further characterize the turn to practice inspired by discussions and articles within the Management Learning community – at the cost of simplifying the richness of its diversity – I summarize the main points as follows:

Practice is seen as an epistemology and not only as an empirical phenomenon (Gherardi, 2011; Orlikowski, 2010). The expression ‘re-turn to practice’, which appeared in another Special Issue, ‘Re-turn to Practice: Understanding Organization as It Happens’, from a workshop which took place in 2006 on the island of Mykonos, Greece, gives voice to the search for an epistemological shift. The editors explained that ‘re-turn’ suggests that we have to start afresh, with an examination of the concept which draws on more recent theories. ‘Social practice theories do not return to “modern” practice theories of the first generation’ (Miettinen et al., 2009: 1311). A search for post-modern/posthumanist epistemologies signals a departure to decentre the subject and a way to overcome traditional dichotomies (human/non-human, nature/culture, mind/body, etc.).

The body and embodied knowledge as sites of knowing. Sensible knowing and aesthetics signal attention to non-cognitive relations in practicing (Stierand, 2015; Strati, 2007).

Sociomaterial relations characterize both the understanding of relations among humans, artefacts, technologies and the material world in general and the fact that within a practice, meaning and matter are inseparable (Blackler and Regan, 2009). The concept of sociomaterial practices implies not only that the social and the material are co-constituted but also that nature and culture are entangled (Orlikowski and Scott, 2008).

A process orientation (Antonacopoulou and Chiva, 2007; Beech et al., 2012; Geiger, 2009) in order to consider the dynamics between learning, knowing and practicing.

A methodological orientation to empirical research on practices using ethnographic approaches, participative research, ethnomethodological sensibility and a concern for ethics in research (Antonacopoulou, 2004; Charreire-Petit and Huault, 2008; Eikeland and Nicolini, 2011).

In the following section, I shall elaborate my presentation of the turn to practice in relation to a similarly heterogeneous movement: the turn to affect. Nevertheless, I wish to stress that the term ‘practice’ has been used as a theoretical organizing term or community-creating device,² but it does not refer to a unified theory nor does it designate a single community of scholars. On the contrary, the field of practice-based studies has expanded enormously through different theoretical approaches, and it is formed by diversified groups of scholars.

Same years and another turn

In organizations studies, the turn to affect has come about slowly and only in recent years (Kenny et al., 2011), whereas in other communities, mainly cultural studies, humanities and psychology, discussion on the theme began much earlier and in the same years when the turn to practice appeared. Its starting point was in the mid-1990s, when critical theorists and cultural critics proposed a substantive ontological and epistemological shift. To mention some major works, we can refer to Massumi (1995, 2002), Clough and Halley (2007); Seigworth and Gregg (2010), Blackman and Venn (2010). Like the literature on practice, the literature on affect has grown rapidly and in many different directions. For this reason, I shall present only a brief overview without engaging in an exhaustive description.

Although there is no shared understanding of the notion of affect, it is possible to outline some general but fundamental points of agreement in the vast and diverse literature on the turn to affect: (1) affect is two-sided and unintentional, meaning that it consists of non-conscious or not-yet conscious bodily capacities to affect and to be affected – two capacities that develop and proceed in parallel; (2) it is a flow of entangled forces, which remain (invisible) in excess of the practices of the human ‘speaking subject’ and co-emerge through autonomic responses; and (3) it is an assemblage of potentialities, located outside the narrative, which augment or diminish the individual’s capacity to act or engage with other agents (human or non-human). Therefore, we can affirm that a precarious consensus on the meaning of ‘affect’ is constructed around the idea that it lies beyond the threshold of awareness, subjective meaning and discourse; it is processual and relational.

Following Massumi (1995), I wish to stress that ‘affect is most often used loosely as a synonym for emotion. But […] emotion and affect – if affect is intensity – follow different logics and pertain to different orders’ (p. 88). Some authors, for instance, Grossberg (1992) and Probyn (2005), refer to affect as firmly rooted in biology and in our physical response to feelings. They describe affective states as neither narratively structured nor organized in response to our interpretations of situations, whereas emotion refers to the cultural and social expression of feelings. In distinguishing between the two, emotion is said to pertain to biography, while affect pertains to biology (Nathanson, 1992); emotion requires a subject, while affect does not. For Massumi (2002), affect ‘escapes confinement’ (p. 35) in the body, while emotion is the capture of affect, that is, a sociolinguistic fixing of the quality of an experience. Since emotion is the expression of that capture, this expression implies that something has always and again escaped. For this reason, Massumi views ‘affect’ as the name for what eludes form, cognition and meaning.

Moreover, in this article, my reason for drawing a clear distinction between affect and emotion is that emotion has been thoroughly explored in the literature on learning and knowing (Antonacopoulou, and Gabriel, 2001; Reynolds and Vince, 2007; Vince, 2002), while affect as intensity has been relatively unexplored. An exception is the work by Margaret Wetherell (2015), which takes a psychological approach. She argues that a notion of affective practice is more commensurate with trends in contemporary psychobiology since it emphasizes relationality and negotiation and is attentive to the flow of affecting episodes:

A practice approach positions affect as a dynamic process, emergent from a polyphony of intersections and feedbacks, working across body states, registrations and categorizations, entangled with cultural meaning-making, and integrated with material and natural processes, social situations and social relationships. (Wetherell, 2015: 139)

Wetherell (2015) focuses on affective practices (falling in love, responding to loss, dealing with threat and being joyful). She writes that ‘affective activity is an ongoing flow (a “polyphony” according to Damasio, 1999) of forming and changing bodyscapes’ (Wetherell, 2015: 147). To understand her approach to practice better, it is important to note that she follows a human-centred practice theory, inspired by Schatzki et al. (2001) and Reckwitz (2002), whereby agency is attributed only to persons, while materiality is part of the context but has no agency.

In introducing the turn to affect, my intention is to stress that it has several features in common with the turn to practice: for example, they share a similar vocabulary, where terms like assemblage (agencement), flow, turbulence, emergence, becoming, compossibility, relationality, the machinic, the inventive, the event, the virtual, temporality, autopoiesis, heterogeneity and the informational are common. But what mostly links the two turns is an interest in a search for a post-epistemology that decentres the human subject, linking the social and the natural, the mind and body and the cognitive and the affective. I shall develop this argument with the support of three vignettes: the first illustrates the concept of atmosphere in the context of situated practices at Fondation Louis Vuitton, the second presents affective computing as a technological practice and the third brings in art in connection with affect to discuss representation practices.

Affective atmosphere at Fondation Louis Vuitton on a Saturday afternoon

Brennan (2004) broadly conceptualizes ‘affective atmosphere’ as the shared ground from which affect emerges. The expression denotes an experience that occurs before and together with the construction of subjectivity across human and non-human materialities (Anderson, 2009; Sedgwick, 2003).

‘Atmosphere’ has been defined as impersonal or transpersonal intensity (Stewart, 2007), environment, tone in literature (Ngai, 2005), mimetic waves of sentiment (Thrift, 2007) or a sense of place (Rodaway, 1994). Atmospheres surround people, things and environments: on entering a room, we can feel a serene or a tense atmosphere; an atmosphere ‘surrounds’ a couple, or one finds oneself ‘enveloped’ by an atmosphere; atmospheres ‘radiate’ from one individual to another; and atmospheres appear and disappear. Anderson (2009) stresses that ‘atmospheres are interlinked with forms of enclosure – the couple, the room, the garden – and particular forms of circulation – enveloping, surrounding and radiating’ (p. 80). For Anderson, ‘the term atmosphere presents itself to us as a response to a question; how to attend to collective affects that are not reducible to the individual bodies that they emerge from?’.

The question is intriguing, and an empirical example may provide an illustration of how an affective atmosphere is contained and produced by a specific architecture, and how it circulates in social practices situated within a museum building on a Saturday afternoon, in a metropolitan city.

The scene is the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris in October 2014, a week after the inauguration of the site designed by Frank Gehry. It is a warm and sunny day. There is an hour-long queue to enter, but nobody seems annoyed by the wait.

Once inside, the visitors are curious to discover how the building has been constructed and what it contains. Certainly, there are the traditional museum spaces: small exhibition rooms, a cinema projecting a film on the foundation’s conception and construction and where Frank Gehry triumphs, not as a solitary hero but in the midst of the multiracial construction crew. What is surprising and initially confusing is the unconventional space. The building consists of terraces, open spaces where people stroll. The terraces overlook the green of the Jardin d’Acclimatation, where interior and exterior intertwine, nature is contained in the form of flowing water of various kinds and which seems to enter from the outside. From the third floor upwards, the Fondation extends towards Paris. People look to recognize the landmarks of the city, but the city itself is framed within the architecture. After some time, I realized that, like me, the other people were there to walk, constantly changing the terraces and letting their children play with their reflections in the mirrors that surround the columns or with the slowly flowing water. The place is designed to give the sensation of being inside and outside at the same time. The pleasure lies in changing the outside/inside and enjoying constantly changing views, and the international and colourful crowd wandering quiet and enchanted through the building. At a certain point, my attention was caught by a couple of young fathers sitting on a bench of one of the upper terraces. Each of them was holding a baby about 6 months old, whom they were bottle-feeding while chatting with each other in French. I could not resist stopping to observe them, and I confess that I took a photograph from a distance, so perfect was the image in its spontaneous composition (Picture 2).

Picture 2.

An affective atmosphere at Fondation Louis Vuitton.

The two men were good-looking, tall and dressed in the same way. The children were held so that they looked at each other, and the pushchairs were arranged to frame the scene to the right and left of the couple. I waited to see whether the quartet would be joined by the mothers, but I did not see them come. Then, at the exit, I again saw the young fathers with their pushchairs. I imagined that the two men were long-time friends and that they had met to see one of the ‘musts’ of the Paris season and to spend a Saturday afternoon together. I wondered if I would have noticed two women out together with their babies in the same way. Probably not. The fact that two men – presumably the fathers of the two children – had gone out together as mothers often do and were looking after such small children was something unusual in Europe. Moreover, their activities (of care, friendship) were intertwined with a sophisticated cultural activity like going to visit the Frank Gehry building in the first week of its opening. They were surrounded by an aura which expressed and made palpable their class membership and also their ethnicity.

I have provided an illustration of how the affective atmosphere is physically inscribed in an architectural project and is realized through the participation of people who embody a feeling and express it through situated practices. The space is experienced and interpreted as a texture of interweaving practices: the social practices that we recognize as those of Saturday afternoon sociability (doing friendship, family and entertainment) intertwined with practices of cultural enjoyment, gender and fathering. Through the theoretical framework of practice, we can analyse the ‘doing-in-situation’, and the theoretical framework of affect directs attention to the collective circulation of feeling and of an atmosphere that adds to practices the dimension of intensity that emanates from but exceeds the assembling of bodies, activities and materialities.

Affective computing: The Affective Tigger

With the second vignette, I shall further explore the theme of sociomaterial practices and affect embedded in technological practices. We can consider as an example ‘The Affective Tigger’ a project elaborated by the MIT Media Lab (Picture 3). From the web page where it is presented (affect.media.mit.edu/projectpages/archived/projects/Atigger.html), we can read,

The Affective Tigger is an endeavor to build a toy that responds to the user or playmate in a natural and meaningful manner. Specifically, the Affective Tigger recognizes and reacts to the emotion the child is exhibiting. For example, when the child is ‘happily’ playing with the Affective Tigger, the child will move and hold him in a manner that expresses this happiness: she might bounce him along the floor, or hug and kiss him. The Affective Tigger senses this physical interaction, for example he might recognize that the child is bouncing him, and outwardly expresses his own happiness in turn. In this manner, the Affective Tigger is both mimicking the mood expressed by the child and reinforcing a behavior exhibited by the child, namely bouncing him.

Picture 3.

The affective Tigger in Sara’s drawing.

The Affective Tigger and other affective pets may be seen as icons that materialize the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material, the affective and the cognitive. They symbolize how persons and things are con-figured, re-configured or how they might be figured differently.

Affective wearable computers may accompany our daily life:

a watch that talks to a global network, a network interface that is woven comfortably into your jacket or vest, local memory in your belt, a miniature videocamera and holographic display on your eyeglasses […]Your wearable camera could recognize the face of the person walking up to you, and remind you of their name and where you last met. Signals can be passed from one wearable to the other through your conductive ‘BodyNet’. A handshake could instantly pass to my online memory the information on your business card. (Picard, 1995: 13–14)

When Rosalind Picard coined the term ‘affective computing’, she outlined a research programme whose goal is to give computers the ability to simulate empathy, recognize and express emotions. She imagined several scenarios where computers could simulate or express emotions: entertainment, expression, learning, information retrieval, communications, design, health and human interaction. She assumed, in fact, that affect plays a key role in understanding phenomena such as attention, memory and aesthetics.

Her research programme has been criticized for its underlying cognitive model of affect, and an interactional approach to affective computing has been developed on the assumption that affect is culturally bound and constructed in action and interaction (Boehner et al., 2007). Therefore, the point is not to enhance the affect-processing capacities of computer systems, but rather to help people to understand and experience their own emotions. For example, affective computing has applications for developing technologies to be used by people with autism or in e-learning or counselling.

With this second vignette, I wish to stress how the nature of human/computer interaction is changing, and how affect is not only embedded in technological practices but also manipulated for commercial purposes in becoming embedded in technological devices living with us and within us. Technological practices and artefacts embed affect, and similar to architecture or to the experience economy, they affect humans in their relationships with technology and the extent to which the boundaries between the two are blurred. As Knorr Cetina (1997) put it, we live in a post-social world – and, in Braidotti’s (2013) words, also in a post-human world. Affect may be conceived as what circulates within a technological practice connecting humans and more-than-humans into a whole. The power of affect in the social structuring of practices like organizing and managing has been empirically explored (Thompson and Willmott, 2016). Affect is defined here as the capacity of interaction within a situated sociomaterial practice.

The Quintet of the Astonished: making affect visible and sentient

The third vignette is meant to pose a question that relates both to methodology – how to make affect visible in situated practices – and to theory, that is, how to overcome the limits of representational theorizing. I chose to talk of new media and art in relation to the turn to affect and to refer to a digital video by Bill Viola The Quintet of the Astonished, 2000 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=As7OtWMYPRc, colour video rear projection on screen). My hope is to produce in the audience the same physical experience produced in my body by the understanding of ‘affect’ when I saw the retrospective dedicated by the Grand Palais in Paris to Bill Viola in 2014. After a couple of hours of contemplating his work – mainly videos and installations – I was sick. My eyes were communicating to my stomach a feeling of distress because the world around me had lost its usual spatial–temporal coordinates. Everything was uncanny and my body had a physical reaction of alarm to the perceived fascination and horror of a familiar yet unrecognizable world. At that moment, I thought that I had grasped the meaning of affect as the intensity of an aesthetic experience and of ‘being affected’ as the bodily experience of feeling sick. Pleasure and horror were blurred, and it was undoubtedly a physical and not a cognitive experience.

Bill Viola is one of the most celebrated exponents of video art. He expresses his emotional and spiritual journey through life, death and transfiguration in moving paintings and monumental installations. In the digital video The Quintet of the Astonished – inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s painting of a quartet of executioners surrounding Christ – we see affective shifts among a group of five figures. One minute of action captured with high-speed film yields 16minutes of playback. ‘Sculpting time’ is how Viola defines his art.

The video is an intense tableau of shifting and momentary emotions among the figures, whose relationships were unplanned and exist in varying intensities over the work’s duration. The slow-motion effect allows one to view the wave of emotions that overwhelm these people. At the beginning, the figures are simply ‘there’ in their neutral expressions; however, they soon begin to change as their emotions – different for each of them – begin to overtake them and build up and up until each person is left drained. The neutral background gives the feeling that there is no connection between the five persons and the outside world, nor between each person and the others; yet they are enclosed in their own affective world, where time is suspended for them. By opening the imperceptible in-between of emotional states, The Quintet of the Astonished accomplishes a technical expansion of our subjectivity, and it exemplifies how the new media are technically able to enlarge the threshold of the now.

Mark Hansen (2004) has described Bill Viola’s artwork as an icon of how new media technology allows for a closer relationship with ourselves and for a more intimate experience of our vitality. He writes that ‘insofar as new media art invests in the bodily experience of affectivity, intensifying it and enlarging its scope, it might be said to embody time consciousness and, indeed, to embody the being of time itself’ (Hansen, 2004: 589).

It is important to mention the direction of Viola’s research when he produced The Quintet of the Astonished, which was part of a larger project ‘The Representation of the Passions’ conceived when he was working at the Getty Research Center in 1998. The project was devoted to exploring how the extremes of emotion can be visually depicted. Viola was interested in capturing the transitions between emotional states, and he focused on gradual transitions, on the idea of emotional expression as a continual fluid motion. The transition is the ambiguous time when a shift from being happy to sad is just as important as the main emotion. We, as viewers of such transitions, are exposed to the imperceptible, subtle nuances of discrete but continuous emotional states that we can grasp only with the mediation of technology, assimilate through the modality of affectivity and respond to them with the resonances that they trigger in our bodies. Viola created a way to address the in-betweenness that is at the core of a relational epistemology, where it is no longer being but becoming that challenges our theoretical approach to the world and to research.

Both the turn to affect and the turn to practice are grounded in a post-epistemology that is a main concern also within the debate on post-qualitative research methodologies (Koro-Ljungberg and MacLure, 2013; St. Pierre and Jackson, 2014), which explores how to develop empirical research that acknowledges the idea of entanglement, intra-action, agencement and similar concepts. In fact, Barad’s (2007, 2013) concept of entanglement – the constitutive entanglement of the social and the material – makes all the categories of humanist qualitative research problematic. Lather and St. Pierre (2013) clearly pose the question: how do we think a ‘research problem’ (p. 630) in the imbrication of an agentic assemblage of diverse elements that are constantly intra-acting, never stable, never the same?

Viola’s video art is a tangible answer to how the materiality of a work of art is in itself performed, and how knowing/feeling arises from the emerging patterns of interaction among affective phenomena, the material arrangements for knowing/representing these phenomena and aesthetic practices of surrendering to an artwork. Also, Beyes and Steyaert (2011) cite the example of slow motion in Viola’s work to introduce the issue of non-representational theorizing about spacing in organization studies. They map out a number of features that inform the practice of non-representational theorizing: first, everyday practice and materiality; second, embodiment and the body; third, affect and sensation; and fourth, multiplicity and a minor politics.

The critique of representational knowledge in organization studies and the search for non-representational approaches has already a tradition in organization studies, and it is at the centre of renewed attention among cultural geographers, post-qualitative researchers and affect scholars. The critiques of representational epistemologies are based on the specific status of representation as the true copy of reality (Lorino et al., 2011). Nigel Thrift is credited with the expression ‘non-representational theory’ (Thrift, 1996, 2007), even if the expression ‘more-than-representational’ (Lorimer, 2005) is more suited to defining the search for research methodologies with which to study embodied experiences, affects and enactments instead of just their representation. The field of artistic practices may inspire experimentation with writing practices outside representationalism (Benozzo et al., 2016; Vaughan, 2005) or with producing hybrid visual/writing texts that use photography as an interruptive device (Gherardi and Strati, 2017, forthcoming).

Conclusion

My intention in the keynote speech for the Milan conference was to show the commonalities between the turn to practice and the turn to affect and to urge practice scholars to become more sensitive to the affective dimension in the study of practices. In so doing, I underplayed the differences between the two turns. Undoubtedly, a systematic review and comparison is needed in the future, but I postponed it since the language of a careful comparison and explanation would be in contrast with the performative language that I chose in order to put affect on stage while the visual writer – Sara Seravalle – was drawing my talk (Picture 4).

Picture 4.

Sara’s complete visual narrative.

Nevertheless, this text has a concluding section that imposes an order of discourse in which I have to summarize the main points of contact between the two turns.

The turn to practice and the turn to affect are both produced within the same epistemological shift towards a relational epistemology in which becoming is privileged with respect to being, and ‘in-betweenness’ is explored as intra-connections both symbolic and material. Therefore, epistemological sensibility is the first commonality between the two turns.

A second commonality is the central place attributed to the body and embodied knowledge. While in the turn to practice, the body is present and re-presented as a body that knows through the senses and contains aesthetic knowledge, in the turn to affect the body is there in order to be affected and affect. It is a less individual, self-contained body and a more social and collective one. By stressing that affect is not situated in the individual, Manning (2010) describes the body as always being more than one, ‘more assemblage than form, more associated milieu than being’ (p. 118). And Latour (2004) writes, ‘to have a body is to learn to be affected, meaning “effectuated”, moved, put into motion by other entities, humans or non-humans. If you are not engaged in this learning you become insensitive, dumb, you drop dead’ (p. 205). The dual movement between being affected, and affect is also a movement between the voluntary and the involuntary implicated by affect. The body is the interface with the world, and it is what we learn to use to become sensitive to the world.

The third commonality is constructed around materiality and sociomateriality. Within the turn to practice, sociomateriality is paramount, while in the turn to affect, the relationship is more subtle. On one hand, affect is embedded in the material world – such as architectures or technologies – that affects human life and can be manipulated and become a commodity like any other. On the other hand, affect is presented as immaterial, non-discursive, pre-personal and unconscious. Scholars interested in affect typically seek ‘something that perhaps escapes or remains in excess of the practices of the “speaking subject” ’ (Blackman and Venn, 2010: 9), but this does not mean that what is discursive is not material. As a reaction to the dominance of discourse analysis, affect should represent materiality and the presence of the not-yet-said. Nevertheless, the dimension of the affective and the material are not in opposition to discourse studies (Iedema, 2011), and the practice turn is a good example of research on material-discursive practices.

While on the theoretical level, there is commonality between the turn to affect and the turn to practice, on the empirical level, there is complementarity between the two. The methodology for the empirical study of practices may be enriched by considering the qualitative dimension of intensity in relation to situated practices or by exploring the technology of the new media that expand our experience of the world. On the other hand, the empirical study of affect is still underdeveloped and may be enriched by the empirical study of how affect is produced in mundane situated encounters.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author is grateful to Sara Seravalle for their collaboration and the permission to publish her work. She is grateful also to Mara Gorli, Giuseppe Scaratti and the other organizers of the Milan conference who suggested the idea of visual writing. The author thanks Ann Cunliffe and the editors of Management Learning for their invitation to write a performative text. She also wishes to acknowledge the contribution of the photographers: photographs 3 and 4 were taken by Silvia Ivaldi, photograph 2 was taken and anonymized by me and photograph 1 was taken by Antonio Strati who supervised the graphic performance of the all the images.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Notes

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