Becoming Acrobat,Becoming Academic: An Affective,Autoethnographic Inquiry Into Collective Practices of Knowing and Becoming

Abstract

This article mobilizes a Spinozo–Deleuzian understanding of affect to articulate connections between embodied sensation and academic thinking, connections which surfaced during my ethnographic and autoethnographic research as a circus performer. I argue against reifying differences between the production of knowledge and of movement, suggesting we explore similarities in the conditions of their emergence including reflection, multiplicity, and responsiveness to repetition. In so doing, I challenge hegemonic ideas about who belongs in the body of an academic; inviting us to better understand our “less-rational” and more collective selves in becoming purveyors of academic knowledge.

Keywords

autoethnography ethnographies methodologies feminist qualitative research feminist methodologies re-thinking critical theory methods of inquiry affect theory

Movement one: becoming aerialist

I let go, falling forward then sideways, rotating slowly or more quickly depending on the angle of my legs, the way I am wrapped in fabric, and the force of letting go. I don’t feel everything—it’s far too much to notice all at once—isn’t it always? Sometimes I notice fear, sometimes exhilaration; sometimes I just feel the pressure, the speed, the wind, the rotation. Each letting go has high stakes at 20 feet; each moment of release is preceded by a choice to open your hand, to lean into space, to trust, to risk, or to simply ignore the alternatives. Sometimes the choice is easy, sometimes it’s fraught, but each time I do this (and I don’t always let go), it is the emergent accumulation of a million flickering intensities (a rough estimation since they are defined in part by their excessive nature) that in that moment emerge as a letting go.

Movement two: becoming academic

I sit at my computer, eyes not really seeing, inhabiting a landscape of flickering intensities that some might call ideas but which feel to me like breathless grasping at slippery fish. I don’t feel everything, usually just the parts that surface as discomfort from sitting too long, or excitement when an idea surfaces. . .or maybe just before it surfaces. . .my heart races. Fear? Exhilaration? Hope? Insight? These intensities have different registers, sometimes almost indiscernible, while at other times the pounding of blood in my ears is very loud. At some point a choice emerges. “This” is an idea, “this” is an object, “this” is worth naming, trying to write down. It’s a small choice. It’s not a high-stakes commitment like letting yourself fall from 20 feet, but it’s still the emergence of action out of (approximately) a million flickering intensities. A convergence or emergence of knowing that seems adequate to acting, even if the action is only naming or writing something down; a layer in the building of knowledge or an argument that can change the direction of future emergences.

Introduction

What do becoming academic and becoming acrobat have in common? And what can their similarities offer that their separation does not? My ethnographic research with Canadian circus performers (and my artistic practice) involved hundreds of hours in the gym and on stage: sweating, bruised and blistered, suspended in the air by my hands or some other limb, immersed in feelings of fear, exhilaration, and exhaustion. This research also involved hundreds of hours thinking, writing, and working to further scholarly knowledge about art, labor, and embodiment among circus performers. In bringing these two experiences together, I argue two related things: first, that significant parts of the process of thinking/feeling are not fundamentally different between thinking academically or sensing acrobatically, and second, accepting the premise that thinking is not primarily or solely a rational autonomous practice of the mind also opens the opportunity for thinking/feeling/knowing differently—in particular in more sensory and collective ways.

There is still a powerful moral currency to the separation of “rational” cognition from sensation and emotion, despite growing evidence, even in fields like neuroscience, that these dualisms have lost much of their explanatory power (Pessoa, 2015). Following on this separation, some subject/objects are normatively understood to be more embodied than others. We talk with enthusiasm about the acrobat’s body, the athlete’s body, or the yoga practitioner’s body (Chase, 2006; Lea, 2009; Wacquant, 2004), and with often objectifying fascination about the disabled, gendered, or racialized body (Ahmed, 2004; Gibson, 2006; Inahara, 2009). But when it comes to the researchers body, the thinking body—we get uncomfortably close to questioning the nature of the rationality that is supposed to set scholarly thought apart. This discomfort of course rests on the hegemonic, long-standing Cartesian dualism between mind and body, which despite being repeatedly critiqued, still underlies our systems of law, governance, and knowledge production (N. Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013). This article mobilizes affect theory, specifically the branch that builds on the lineage of Spinoza and Deleuze, which characterizes affect as intensity and movement, and understands it to occur in a pre- or extra-subjective way (Deleuze, 1978; Gatens, 2014; Gregg & Seigworth, 2010; Massumi, 2002a; Spinoza, 2000).

The becoming-acrobatic work described here is my (ongoing) participation in the contemporary circus (see Figure 1). It consists of training and performing (and teaching and watching) dance, character, and acrobatic movements on several different aerial apparatuses hung 10 to 30 feet in the air—primarily aerial silks (Fabric that hangs from about 20 feet down to the ground) but also lyra (hanging metal ring) and trapeze (hanging metal bar). This disciplined practice involves 2 to 4 times a week in the gym, includes both recreational and professional performances, and fundamentally impacts my body and my ways of being in and engaging with the world. The process I speak of when I refer to becoming-academic is primarily the rigorous institutional process of undertaking ethnographic research on the circus for my PhD, during which I was acquiring the credibility, authority, titles, and skills to step into the role of scholar. It is also an ongoing practice, as I continue to conduct new research, teach, read, analyze, and write as a faculty member.

Figure 1.

Author in performance on aerial silks.

It Starts With a (Public) Feeling

My investigation is sparked by feelings of discomfort I experienced undertaking this research. Feelings that I am intentionally not keeping to myself. This discomfort has two related parts. First that I am not qualified to step into the role of academic, and second, that this failure of qualification is related to my inability to uphold the boundary between my rational and “other” selves (perhaps alternatively articulated as my ability/willingness to perceive their connection).

I am not the first to experience doubts and anxieties when entering academia. These feelings are not interior to my/the self, there is extensive evidence that many people, especially those in bodies marginalized through racialization and those gendered female, are treated as “out of place” in the academy (Mahtani, 2004). Pervasive discrepancies according to gender and race, which are progressively worse as you look up the academic hierarchy, show the institutionalization of these issues (Monroe & Chiu, 2010). As such this anxiety about becoming-academic is not just mine, arising in the space of “my body,” but is directly linked to processes of power and spaces of exclusion experienced in the bodies and lives of many “others” (Muhs, Niemann, González, & Harris, 2012; Navarro, 2017). These exclusions are certainly not only because of how the boundaries of rationality have been policed, but there are significant connections between the ways we structure and articulate dominant forms of academic knowing, and hegemonic practices of power that value some bodies and some ways of being over others (Ahmed, 2015). In this context, I understand my professional doubts to be connected to how I am embodied, and more broadly to a continuing public discomfort with the idea of embodied and intellectual practice contaminating one another.

Despite several decades of feminist and postpositivist alternatives, we still inhabit what Steinman calls an “epistemological unconscious” of “methodological positivism” (Clough, 2009). Many scholars are shifting this “epistemological unconscious.” This article is situated alongside a diverse body of work redefining the ontological status of reason including feminist (Grosz, 2010; Prokhovnik, 2002), neuroscientific (N. Rose & Abi-Rached, 2013), philosophical (Barlassina & Newen, 2014; Massumi, 2002a), and new materialist approaches (Coole & Frost, 2010). As such I see this article as part of the emergence of alternative “structures of feelings” (R. Williams, 1977). Ideas about what academic thought is are already shifting, and my articulation is both a contribution to, and emerges from, this collective possibility.

Using affect theory to explore similarities and articulate a more porous relationship between my academic and embodied practices allows me to understand my experience of slippage between intellectual and embodied practice not as a failure, but as a failure to conform to a weak model of thought. Thus, I argue for the development of a different model with more productive and differently located boundaries around practices like acrobatics and academics (or emotion, politics and knowledge). In this process, I intend to shift ideas about who belongs in the body of an academic and what is expected of those who want to form such a body; inviting us not to abandon but to better understand our “less-rational” parts (intuition, enthusiasm, anger, physical capacity, collectivity) in becoming purveyors of knowledge.

This article explores the source of my discomfort, the shared academic/acrobatic experience of the emergence of sensation. First, I draw on what might be called the non-Cartesian or Spinozist line of affect theory (Gregg & Seigworth, 2010) and feminist scholarship to examine the relationship between sensation and normative ideas of thought. Then, I attend to similarities between academic thinking and acrobatic knowing including qualities of reflection, multiplicity, and repetition, exploring how these operate in both becoming academic and becoming acrobatic. Finally, I make some suggestions about what a new model of thought might include. A model that doesn’t rest on a rational disembodied autonomous subject instead could recognize the significance of collectivity and action for though, thus foregrounding alliances and attending to practice and action in knowledge production.

Attending to Sensation

The focus of this research is on small, almost fleeting, moments—the moment when a sensation emerges into consciousness, and the moment before that moment. It turns out this exploration into sensation, as evidenced here and more extensively in the broader literature, requires detailed attention to something that happens in the blink of an eye. It is an important moment, one that holds together both the idea of thought and the idea of the self on which most claims to knowing are based. This section looks at the treatment of this moment in affect literature and describes how it gained significance in my own research, laying the groundwork for the exploration of thinking/feeling/becoming that follows.

The moment of emergence of sensation is a key preoccupation in affect theory. My analysis relies heavily on Deleuze (Deleuze, 1993, 1994; Deleuze & Guattari, 1987), with important contributions to my understanding through the work of several other thinkers (Ahmed, 2015; Blackman, 2012; Clough, Goldenberg, Schiff, Weeks, & Willse, 2007; Colebrook, 2004; Gatens, 2014; Massumi, 2002a, 2015; Ruddick, 2010; J. Williams, 2011). In this largely Deleuzo–Spinozian articulation, affect is understood as an intensity and is not a form but rather a “transition between states” (Massumi, 2002a, p. 27). This transition or passage of tiny perceptions from one to another Deleuze calls microperceptions (1993), and this “variation in intensity is felt” but not—or not immediately—at the level of conscious perception. Importantly these variations do not yet belong to the subject, who has yet to be brought into being. According to Massumi (2002b), Deleuze describes the process by which sensations come to be conscious experiences:

Deleuze . . . considers every step along the chain a “perception.” Before the perception reaches the “molar” level where it can be experienced as a memory, thought, or sensation consciously belonging to the life of the organism as a whole, it has already been these partially and nonconsciously. It has been a crowd of stratum-specific “molecular” or “micro” perceptions. (p. xxx)

As this is not a conscious perception, what does it mean to suggest that microperceptions or variations in intensity are “felt”? Who does the feeling or sensing if affect is presubjective? Because of this presubjective quality, the question of whether one can actually perceive affect is controversial. But as it is this focus on its pre- or extra-subjective qualities that, to me, anchors the value of affect as a conceptual tool, it is necessary to work through this difficulty.

So how do “I” write about preperceptions that I may not be able to sense (or arguably which “I” am not even really present for)? Grappling with this difficulty has led to extensive attention in the literature to the threshold or edge of affective emergence, or the transition from preperceptions to conscious perceptions. Deleuze (1993) says “The point is one of knowing how we move from minute perceptions to conscious perceptions, or from molecular perceptions to molar perceptions” (p. 87). Or as Massumi (2002a) puts it, “It is the edge of the virtual, where it leaks into actual that counts” (p. 43)., Although we first perceive these sensations at the moment of emergence to consciousness, affect is already there, pressing and influencing, prior to our recognition of it, prior to our naming these emergent sensations as thoughts or feelings.

At this edge of conscious perception many scholars agree there is at least the possibility of sensing the “crowd” of “micro-perceptions” which press upon the conscious, or at least sensing the passage through which they move from preceptions to perceptions (Massumi, 2002a). According to Deleuze, affect has an effect on sensation, at least some of the time, it is a pressure, a pressing, or a “prickling” (Deleuze, 1993, p. 87) and as I will discuss later, it is mostly recognized on reflection. It is these small and hardly discernable sensations that are important for understanding what underlies (and connects) both my acrobatic and intellectual experiences.

In my aerial practice, I cultivate a reliance on these pricklings. If you have a pressing, nagging, less than fully conscious sense that you might not be safe before you drop from 20 feet, then you don’t drop . . . you might be wrong, but you need to attend to those early sensations as sometimes you are right. And if you wait till the pricking sense emerges more clearly it might be too late—the ground arrives very fast. Of course, there are also many times when I don’t have a premonition of danger, for so many reasons information about a potential accident may not be available on any level, conscious or preconscious, but part of acrobatic work includes a practice of attending to subtle sensations needed to avoid injury and produce beautiful or moving art. In my scholarly practice, I also have pressing, pricklings, the consequences of ignoring them might not be as life threatening, but their emergence is a central part of my processes of thinking, whether they are “wrong” or “right” they open possibility for other movement/actions/thoughts.

As my scholarly self attended to the embodied sensations of acrobatic work, I practiced the skills of noticing the sensations, intuitions, practices, and repetitions which comprised my acrobatic expertise. This noticing or attending-to did not remain contained within its initial parameters of scholar-observing-acrobat. Instead, the noticing transgressed those boundaries, attending to the sensations and apprehensions of the scholar-self: tendencies, preferences, recollections, aversions, and desires related to my research. In doing this, I found similar emergent sensations were shared by my acrobatic and my academic practice. Using established scholarly practices of writing, reading, coding, counting, organizing, and textual analysis, some concepts surfaced with more articulated force, they became the formal intellectual products of this process (Stephens, 2012, 2016); they explain phenomenon and link to other concepts. But despite this evidence of scholarly work, these “thoughts” emerged in an eerily similar way to the movements of my acrobatic practice, in that they were also informed by the desires, feelings, and sensations of my body.

Thinking/Feeling

In the practice of becoming-academic, or forming an academic body with academic habits and skills, I have been concerned with the expectation that I need to produce “thoughts” as distinct products of intellectual labor. Given my lifetime of experience becoming-woman-in-patriarchy, I have had to consider whether I can (or want to) abandon my highly cultivated expertise in body affinity and emotional sensitivity for the world of unemotional rational thought. One of the offerings of the Spinozist–Deleuzian branch of affect theory is that affect is neither thought nor emotion but prior to, or a precondition of, both. And both thought and emotion are understood to be the blockage, capture, or recognition of affect (Massumi, 2002a).¹ In both cases, there is a threshold of cumulative affective possibilities that translate into a sensation, into a thinking/feeling.

This provides theoretical support for my observations that feeling and thought, as they are carried out either in support of acrobatic or scholarly work, begin in the same place, with pricklings or intensities that surface as felt sensations (in the mind/body). Both what we call thinking and what we call feeling or emotion are the capture and naming of affective intensities. I might call a certain molar emergence of intensities feeling mad, and I call another emergent molar intensity feeling right or feeling interested in something. These latter captive feelings are not very different from what I might understand as thoughts. When I feel right or interested in relation to something—an idea, a text, a movement, I will attend to it, engage it, and multiply my encounters with it, increasing the chances that it will feel “important,” that I will make it into an action or a conscious thought. On the one hand, this leads me to let go of the fabric and drop, make an audience gasp, creating a ripple in the dark room of the theater. On the other hand, it leads me to the key idea in a published paper, creating a ripple in the noisy sphere of academic knowledge production.

Shared Practices: Reflection, Multiplicity, and Repetition

Once emergent-sensation is no longer pigeonholed as either a thought or feeling, we can look at its qualities and explore how it operates outside of this binary. How is thought/feeling related to the un-sensed cacophony of affect that presses below the conscious and threatens/offers to emerge? I discuss below three areas of similarity between my academic thinking and my acrobatic feeling (reflection, multiplicity, and repetition) that offer insight to developing models of nonbinary thought/feeling.

Reflection

The process of recognition and naming of sensation has been described by Deleuze and others as a folding back on itself. “[S]ensation is the first glimmer of a determinate experience, in the act of registering itself as itself across its own event” (Massumi, 2002a, p. 16). In other words, sensation could be understood as the first moment of reflexivity in a repetition or folding of knowing that simultaneously makes the boundaries of both the knower and known. Deleuze describes the relationship between contemplation and the self, suggesting

The question is whether or not the self itself is a contemplation, whether it is not in itself a contemplation and whether we can learn, form behavior, and form our self other than through contemplation. (Deleuze, 1994, p. 73)

He further describes, “There is a self whenever a furtive contemplation has been established” (pp. 78-79). In this way, the initial act of becoming is an act of reflection, a capture-through-reflection at the point of emergence of an idea and of the subject having the idea. This reflection is also described as a “fold” because the contemplation or reflection effects the emerging subject, and this experience folds back to change the micro preceptions or affective possibilities, which then press differently on the conscious register, folding back to change the affective possibilities/probabilities for the next emergence.

I likely recognize and name this emergence as a practice of micro-reflexivity because reflexivity is a practice I undertake extensively in becoming-academic; and in so doing have created favorable conditions for the emergence of this “idea.” Reflexivity is one of the most reliable and established methods for dealing with the challenges of postpositivist research, especially challenges of positionality and fragmented knowledge (Berger, 2015). Decades of feminist and antiracist scholarship have been clear about the importance of understanding how a researcher’s subjectivity impacts research, and the violence that can be enacted, especially on marginalized subjects, by failing to address this (Kobayashi, 2003; Smith, 2012).

Feminist scholars have also illuminated the complexity and potential failures of reflexivity (Kobayashi, 2009; G. Rose, 1997). Berger (2015) identifies three approaches to reflexivity distinguished by the researcher’s positionality in relation to the subject, while Lynch (2000) identifies at least six “reflexivities,” from those “consistent with the Enlightenment ideal of self knowledge” (p. 29) to those that use reflexivity to question the nature of representation itself. Lynch makes a compelling suggestion that reflexivity is not a rarified practice, but is actually hard not to undertake, a notion compatible with the possibility that thought/feeling itself, as experienced by everyone in each moment of consciousness, is predicated on a form of reflexivity.

Many of the difficulties that emerge around mainstream use of reflexivity as a practice of the academic subject occur when we treat subjectivity as static. In response to this, Kobayashi (2009) and others argue for a reflexivity that is a moving living practice, and situated knowledge—as identified through reflexive practices—as actively being situated. The relationship between sensing and subjectivity offered by affect theory can suggest a way out of this difficulty since “[a]ffect and emotion points . . . to the subjects discontinuity with itself” (Clough, 2008, p. 1). If we think about the emergence of a sensation as a micro-reflexivity, or as Massumi (2002a, p. 31) describes a “doubling over of the idea on itself,” this is concurrent with the emergence of the subject, then this micro-reflexivity is no longer a practice of a static subject, but of subject formation. Following this, knowledge is not a detached signifier floating ready for apprehension, but something emerging in very specific locations linked to the emerging subjects doing the apprehending. In this process, reflexivity is not just a practice of becoming-academic, but becoming-subject. This is a different relationship than Descartes offered us between subjectivity and thought. Instead of “I think therefore I am” (typically understood to mean that because I think I can prove I have a self) we might say “in thinking/feeling ‘I’ become” (meaning during the act of thinking/feeling/reflecting, I create a self).

Multiplicity

Since each of us was several there was already quite a crowd. (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p. 3)

What emerges when we think collectivity and rationality simultaneously? My focus in this article (following Deleuze, 1993; Gatens, 2014; Massumi, 2002a) has been on the moment of emergence to consciousness, or capture of affect, the moment which I notice or sense something. This is largely because this moment is empirically available to me. This moment is what “I” can observe. But just because we first notice a thought/feeling at the moment when it becomes conscious or perceivable does not mean this is necessarily the most important moment. As Gatens (2014) says, one of Spinoza’s main projects was “a devaluation of consciousness” (not to be confused with a devaluation of thought which Spinoza argues happens with and without consciousness and with and without an individual thinker). She argues that assuming the moment of conscious recognition to be the starting point or the most critical point in the process of thinking/feeling is an illusion (dearly held by the “I” holding the illusion). According to Spinoza, consciousness (without an understanding of the conditions for its existence) creates an illusion of independent subjectivity, freedom, and free will. When we attend to the causes of our choices, we learn that thinking/feeling arises out of affect, and affect is inherently sociable or nonindividual (Gatens, 2014). As such, if I am not independently arriving at my knowing, a better description of thinking might be that I am becoming aware/emerging alongside a sensation that is already present as a collective affect.

The notion that knowledge is deeply connected to the subject is not a radical one. In fact, the troublesome relationship between subjectivity and knowing has been one of the central concerns of scientific knowledge production in different forms throughout its history (Daston & Galison, 2007). What affect theory offers, is the idea that this double emergence of conscious thought and subjectivity is not the most important moment. Our fetishization of the individual subject and its possibilities for rational knowing has led us to miss other parts of the process of “thinking.” Fixed subjects apprehending static knowledge may just not be the most effective or useful way to describe how thinking happens.

One of the well-documented problems with the subject–knowledge relationship in being-academic is when we try to reify that subject position. Researchers have described an inner tension or dual-subjectivity characterized most commonly as insider/outsider status that is documented frequently in ethnographic research (Labaree, 2002). This common issue is sometimes addressed through the practice of taking multiple types of field notes (i.e., emotional, analytic, descriptive) or writing parallel texts (Panourgia in Davies, 1999). Scholars of gender and race understand the challenges of static subjectivity. As Kobayashi says, “To adopt an essentialized epistemic position based on identity is to deny the very process through which identity is socially constructed, multiply positioned, and contingent” (Kobayashi, 2009, p. 140). Sarah Ahmed (2004) describes the impression made on the skin by another object or the impression made on the self by another’s action. Only through the impression does the skin or the self become a bounded surface. As we form our subjectivity in particular contexts, who we are, what we know, and what we do are not just products of the self but emergent properties of encounters, and multiple encounters can mean multiple or at least changeable selves. The sociality of affect, its inherently relational quality which includes social formations and collective imaginaries, are key to understanding it.

In academic work, the problem of securing a singular subject position surfaces in the struggle around writing in relation to the desires and expectations of participants’ versus colleagues. This is sometimes addressed through research practices like respondent validation and can be seen in debates about whether to directly report or critically analyze participant’s words. In my ethnographic research, the multiplicity of identities went beyond a simple insider/outsider duality to become a fragmented fun house of selves. Does the most informed writing come through a fresh encounter with something new (“techniques of estrangement” [Gobo, 2008]) or after I have really understood a certain practice (immersive participation)? Which of these versions, and which of these selves, is most accurate, most reliable, and most meaningful? One social formation that was highly influential in my becoming-academic was encountering the work of critical race scholars (Ahmed, 1999; Kobayashi & Peake, 2000; Mahtani, 2002) who’s insights about processes of racialization and the “invisibility of whiteness” allowed me to notice a silence in my and my largely white participants experiences around questions of race in the circus. Encountering this work changed my affective conditions of possibility and shifted which “ideas/feelings” emerged as important or noticeable.

Similarly, live performers, especially those working without a fourth wall,² change and adapt both identity and behavior to the relations established in the performance space. Doing this successfully involves an active attention to the collectivity of feelings in a given location. One of the central skills of a good performer (distinct from technical skills) is the ability to “read the room”—apprehending an unwritten script describing the collectivity of feelings or “atmosphere” (Anderson, 2016) and to produce a commensurately different performance based on that reading. The decisions made by performers are significantly shaped by the audience and the context the performer is working in and resulted in performers talking about a multiplicity of characters or versions of self, even referring to these parts by different names. It seems both acrobats and academics fail to conform to a singular version of self, and some at least use this multiplicity as part of their processes of thinking and acting.

Repetition and Habituation

Although I am arguing that becoming acrobat and becoming academic start in the same place—with the reflective emergence of sensation (and subjectivity) that is not yet thought or feeling, from a cacophony of less than conscious, and somehow collective sensations—these emergences clearly don’t end in the same place/practice/subject. Becoming an aerialist and becoming an academic involve practicing different kinds of collectivities, attention, and movement; organizing perceptions in different ways; and building to different kinds of actions. The point is not to argue that the practices or the becomings are the same, the point is to contribute to the argument that they are not always best organized by a binary representation where one is described as a thought-perception occurring in a place called the mind while the other is understood to be a sensation-feeling-movement occurring in the body. By stepping outside this dichotomy between thinking and feeling, we can attempt deeper explorations of what they actually do comprise. What kinds of practices are part of and uphold various becomings?

Massumi (2002a, p. 189) describes how “practice becomes perception,” and how virtual (nonconscious) perception, influenced by practice, nonetheless presses on our conscious perception but not in ways we can easily anticipate or understand. From presubjective pressing micro-preceptions we have the emergence of almost conscious thought, involving recognition (reflection, naming, folding) which then effects the conditions of possibility for future emergence, or changes the pressing pricklings which may emerge in similar (thought always slightly different) repetitions. In this way, habit is productive as each repetition is colored or “modulated” by what Massumi describes as “a previousness of familiarity and fondness,” but which I think might equally be “felt” in another register—Distaste? Fear? Desire? The key is “an unconsciously ingredient emotional charge” (p. 222) which modulates how the thought/feeling/being emerges the next time . . . more acrobat . . . more scholar . . . more critical-acrobat . . . more embodied-scholar.

The role of repetition or habituation in subject formation is common across many theories of the body and the self. Often subjectivity and identity is understood to emerge from repetition, which instills in the body a certain character or stability (and at times subjugation to normative discourses). Foucault (1975, 1988) with his emphasis on the repetitive disciplines of the body and Judith Butler’s (1990) model of the performed subject generated through performances and transgressions of gender, rest on this principal. Marcell Mauss introduced the term Habitus to refer to the way one embodies the social and cultural world, “the sum total of culturally patterned uses of the body in society” (Csordas, 1990, p. 11). Bourdieu refined and used the term Habitus when describing the set of dispositions or tastes that were related to the social field one occupied. Merleau Ponty also referred to the habit-forming body and suggested that the body has two levels, the sedimented body of habit and the spontaneous body of the present (Shusterman, 2005). Many scholars suggest it is through habit formation that we learn to identify patterns and group information together so that, for example, by knowing through experience and repetition the category “color” we need not reinvent the wheel every time we encounter a new shade (Massumi, 2002b; Merleau-Ponty, 1945; Turner, 2008). Such habits influence our sensations, helping predetermine our experiences, prejudices, and emergent knowledge, creating the conditions of the self and of thought.

In these models, it is through the repetition of practices that subjectivity emerges and also that difference (or different subjectivities) emerge. This converges in many ways with how affect theory understands habituation or repetition. The way habit is used in affect theory is distinct but echoes other approaches. Blackman and Venn (2010) describe it as follows:

Work on affect often eschews the concept of the unconscious for a notion of the nonconscious that is tied to a bodily unconscious understood through the concept of habit. These are forms of bodily memory which lie outside of a subject’s conscious reflections and deliberations and are often enfleshed within the processes of the central nervous system or proprioception. (p. 18)

Beyond this I would argue the importance of not reifying a bounded biological body, these practices are not just “enfleshed” in the nervous system of individuals but also in collective practices of societal habituation of both feelings and actions. Working with this, I no longer need to remain with the traditional scholarly question “who am I and what does this ‘I’ think?” Instead A Spinozo–Deleuzian and feminist affective approach leads me to “what does my body do? and how/who does that help me become?”

Becoming (and Concluding)

As an established philosopher trying to create new ways of thinking, Deleuze was captivated with the project of undoing the self, “how do you make yourself a body without organs?” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). My projects are somewhat different. As a professional artists/performer producing and selling my work, I was actively engaged in making myself an acrobat body with specific muscular abilities, habituated practice, creative capacity, and social recognition/connection that together comprise being/becoming a circus performer. As a PhD candidate trying to gain the credibility to produce authoritative knowledge and working to get hired as an academic, I was focused on making my self an academic mind/body, habituating particular critical questions and practices of reflexivity, skepticism, documentation, and connection, while locating myself in a network of scholars whose work strengthens my own. These are different intentions and involve different repetitions, but they also influence each other.

Becoming-Acrobat

I become an aerial acrobat as I practice particular physical, emotional, and social movements again and again. This work opens up new possibilities in my body, in my thinking/feeling, and in my social world. I gain the physical strength to climb, the technical and embodied skills to perform a range of interesting movements, the confidence to drop, to share my movements publicly, and the recognition from peers and clients of my expertise.

Through repetition of certain actions and movements, the capacities of my body become different, after 100s of hours of remembering to point my toes or extend my legs they begin to do this without conscious intervention. For the most advanced kinds of acrobatic action, I have already “offloaded” or habituated many of the thoughts/feelings/actions needed to do the activity, this creates the conditions under which I can be acrobatic. Repetition opens up new possibilities, for example I can try a harder drop and trust that my body will hold the right shape. This habituation is necessary because no amount of conscious “thinking” will happen fast enough to catch me in a moment of falling.

Habituation is also dangerous and acrobats manage the degree to which they surrender to it, for example refusing to practice certain movements as they might change the body’s habits and make other movement more dangerous or less possible. Aerialists talk about the danger of learning a trick, which has several variations. For example, Annie said, “If you forget that the drop you are doing comes from an opposite side wrap, and you do a same side wrap, you know there’s serious repercussions.” In these instances, the body can become confused by similar but distinct versions resulting in an incorrect and potentially deadly sequence of movements. Repetition also closes opportunities, making my movements more like others, immersing me into a specific language of circus movement, a particular vocabulary which makes communication possible but also shapes it in particular ways.

As a becoming-acrobat these repetitions are not just in my singular body. I don’t learn these things alone but as I enter social relationships and collective practices. Sometimes these relations are described by acrobats as a kind of bodily contagion; where your movements, ideas, and tastes are influenced by others through teaching or just being around each other. Aerial acrobats struggle with ownership of tricks because watching others perform strongly influences movement possibilities in the watcher’s body. Becoming acrobat is not just something that happens in the body of I-acrobat, but is an emergent practice across a large social network of people developing and sharing their practices. These encounters with others change the emergent possibilities and likelihoods of different sorts of repetitions. I also become acrobat when other acrobats hail me into existence by asking for my ideas, feelings, and input or when people pay me to do this work and I become professional. Becoming-acrobat is a process of creating an acrobat body and becoming-acrobat in a social field.

Becoming-Academic

How I become-academic also requires repetition, such as asking critical social questions like “for whom is that true” or “ whose voice is missing” until those become a reflex and I can’t encounter ideas without thinking/feeling those ways of engaging. Soon these practices become part of myself(ves) until I use them like a tool or perhaps like a new muscle or extra limb. Like circus these are actively social practices, in this case through much more formalized education systems. Becoming-scholar is more contentious, documented, and regulated than becoming-acrobat.

Daston and Galison (2007) argue that becoming scientist has meant different things over time; changing scientific paradigms correspond to different scientific practices involving different repetitions, reflections and captures, and producing different scientific selves. Rather than a radical departure from the idea of becoming a rational scientist, Daston and Galison suggest the attention my acrobatic practice brought to my less-than-conscious academic sensations is part of becoming a scientist in the contemporary moment where scientific credibility rests on the idea of the “scientist as expert.” They describe this approach to becoming-scientist-as-expert as including “irrational” practices including preparing the self for intuition through rest, setting aside work, and allowing the unconscious time to work out a problem. The demands on the contemporary scientific subject are different but just as rigorous as any other version of scientific practice, in this case requiring emotional management, extensive labor, intensive identification of one’s position in relation to the scientific problem, and even creativity, artistic ability, and deep introspection. This version of scientific objectivity valorizes judgment or artistic choice and interpretation, over mechanical reproduction and arduous labor—hallmarks of earlier scientific paradigms (Daston & Galison, 2007). Even in the hard sciences there has been a growing sense that scientists rely on the cognitive capabilities of less than conscious thought. Where enlightenment scientists were defined in opposition to artists (severely objective vs. thoroughly subjective), contemporary scientists are increasingly expected to also be artists (Bresler, 2006; Daston & Galison, 2007; Denzin & Lincoln, 2008).

Although I would like to claim my own insights into the role of sensation, intuition, and less than conscious thought in my practice of becoming-academic, apparently the very process of having these emergent insights is already social. These thought/feelings are emerging in an already shifting “public feeling” (Ahmed, 2015) that is valorizing creativity and judgment as traits that are increasingly fundamental to becoming academic in the contemporary moment. The personal discomfort with an older model of becoming-scientist that leads me to seek out the sameness rather than the binary differences between this practice and my physical artistic acrobatic practice is already a social feeling and is arguably an emergent property of already existing conditions of possibility and collective feelings.

Becoming-Multiple, Becoming-Active

A growing body of work has taken shape around public or collective feelings (Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011). Making porous the boundary between thinking and feeling requires furthering ideas about public or collective thinking. For many, challenging autonomous thinking brings up fear of lost agency and challenging rational (unemotional) thinking brings up fear of lost “truth.” This article argues however that the time is right for these challenges to also bring about other experiences and practices. A social model of thinking/feeling can open up political space for different actions and responsibility for different kinds of practices. When we recognize the role of the social in the practice of thinking/feeling, we de-individuate this practice, we also foreground the presence of the political.

This is not a simple utopian solution to problems of power in knowledge production. The exclusions of so many from academia and from the role of knowledge producer are upheld by many divergent and interwoven systems of power and won’t be dismantled with a single philosophical change. There are weaknesses in this approach as well, it is troublingly woven into the current political and economic climate in which we see ideas of “creativity” increasingly valorized and expected from a range of workers traditionally outside the creative sphere. This issue of the growth of creative or immaterial labor in a post-Fordist society is certainly not confined to the labor of research and the scientific identities now expected of scholars, but is also present in the shifting role of the artist in society more broadly, a shift that does not always indicate what it seems to on first glance (rather than growing freedom and satisfaction, we see growing precarity and vulnerability) (Lazzarato, 2008; Rancière, 2004). But imperfect conditions do not mean unproductive conditions, the necessary cautions around the pervasiveness of racism and sexism and the exploitative nature of the current political–economic paradigm can be part of what helps move these ideas forward.

In what has become habituated as part of being a Deleuze-informed academic, I want to think about what a body can do (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987). What does an artist-acrobat-scientist allow that was previously less or im-possible, but also what does this body obscure, what does it cover for, and how productive is it? If we learn from critical labor scholars about the pitfalls of an increasingly creative (precarious, marginalized) workforce, what might we see as the pitfalls of an increasingly creative (Fragmented? De-historicized? Individuated?) scholar or scholarly practice. What do different kinds of academic bodies do? How, for example, do I make myself a rigorous academic body that does transformative social justice work? In the case of my work on the circus, this was about learning from and having my capacity expanded by feminist and critical race scholars (Mahtani, 2002; Peake & Kobayashi, 2002) whose bodily and scholarly experiences extend beyond my own. This part of scholarly practice, where we really encounter and engage with one another and are deliberate about those encounters, seems a valuable part of thinking rationality and collectivity simultaneously. Ruddick (2010) has written about the role of encountering alterity and difference in mobilizing political subjectivities and also describes how “humans must collaborate to enhance their potential or power to act” (p. 24).

This article argues that making any body, to the degree that we can be deliberate about it, is about noticing and reflecting on the kinds of practices we are actually engaged in, the repetitions we undertake, and what kind of collectivities we form. Rather than asking what kinds of subjects we are (becoming), we might more often ask with whom and how should we be allied, and what might those alliances do to the possibilities of our future thinking/feeling.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Ontario Graduate Scholarship (2006) the Canadian Institute of Health Research’s Health Care Technology and Place Fellowship (2006 and 2007), and The University of Toronto’s School of Graduate Studies Fellowship (2007 and 2008).

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

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

Notes

Author Biography

Lindsay Stephens is a lecturer at the University of Toronto Scarborough teaching in Human Geography and Urban Studies. Her research explores cultural politics, emotion, affect, and the body, social justice, and knowledge production practices.

References

Ahmed

(1999). She’ll wake up one of these days and find she’s turned into a nigger: Passing through hybridity. Theory, Culture & Society, 16, 87-106.

Ahmed

(2004). Collective feelings: Or, the impressions left by others. Theory, Culture & Society, 21, 25-42.

Ahmed

(2015). The cultural politics of emotion (2nd ed.). New York, NY: Routledge.

Anderson

(2016). Neoliberal affects. Progress in Human Geography, 40, 734-753.

Barlassina

Newen

(2014). The role of bodily perception in emotion: In defense of an impure somatic theory. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 89, 637-678.

Berger

(2015). Now I see it, now I don’t: Researcher’s position and reflexivity in qualitative research. Qualitative Research, 15, 219-234.

Berlant

(2011). Cruel optimism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Blackman

(2012). Immaterial bodies: Affect, embodiment, mediation. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

Blackman

Venn

(2010). Affect. Body & Society, 16, 7-28.

10.

Bresler

(2006). Embodied narrative inquiry: A methodology of connection. Research Studies in Music Education, 27, 21-43.

11.

Butler

(1990). Gender trouble. New York, NY: Routledge.

12.

Chase

(2006). (Un)disciplined bodies: A Foucauldian analysis of women’s Rugby. Sociology of Sport Journal, 23, 229-247.

13.

Clough

P. T.

(2008). The affective turn: Political economy, biomedia and bodies. Theory, Culture & Society, 25, 1-22.

14.

Clough

P. T.

(2009). The new empiricism: Affect and sociological method. European Journal of Social Theory, 12, 43-61.

15.

Clough

P. T.

Goldenberg

Schiff

Weeks

Willse

(2007). Notes towards a theory of affect-itself. Ephemera: Theory and Politics in Organization, 7, 60-77.

16.

Colebrook

(2004). The sense of space: On the specificity of affect in Deleuze and Guattari. Postmodern Culture, 15(1).

17.

Coole

Frost

(2010). New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

18.

Csordas

(1990). Embodiment as a paradigm for anthropology. Ethos, 18, 5-47.

19.

Daston

Galison

(2007). Objectivity. Brooklyn, NY: Zone Books.

20.

Davies

C. A.

(1999). Reflexive ethnography: A guide to researching selves and others. London, England: Routledge.

21.

Deleuze

(1978). Lecture transcripts on Spinoza’s concept of affect. Retrieved from https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/images-by-section/departments/research-centres-and-units/research-centres/centre-for-invention-and-social-process/deleuze_spinoza_affect.pdf

22.

Deleuze

(1993). The fold: Leibniz and the Baroque ( Conley

Trans.). Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

23.

Deleuze

(1994). Difference and repetition ( Patton

, Trans.). New York, NY: Columbia University Press.

24.

Deleuze

Guattari

(1987). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

25.

Denzin

N. K.

Lincoln

Y. S.

(2008). The landscape of qualitative research (3rd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

26.

Foucault

(1975). Discipline & punish: The birth of the prison. New York, NY: Vintage.

27.

Foucault

(1988). Technologies of the self. In Gutman

Martin

L. H.

Hutton

P. H.

(Eds.), Technologies of the self: A seminar with Michel Foucault (pp. 16-49). Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press.

28.

Gatens

(2014). Affective transitions and Spinoza’s art of joyful deliberation. In Angerer

M.-L.

Bosel

Ott

(Eds.), Timing of affect: Epistemologies of affection (pp. 17-34). Chicago, IL: Diaphanes.

29.

Gibson

B. E.

(2006). Disability, connectivity and transgressing the autonomous body. Journal of Medical Humanities, 27, 187-196.

30.

Gobo

(2008). Chapter 9- How to Observe. In Doing ethnography. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE.

31.

Gregg

Seigworth

G. J.

(2010). The affect theory reader. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

32.

Grosz

(2010). Feminism, materialism and freedom. In Coole

Frost

(Eds.), New materialisms: Ontology, agency, and politics (pp. 139-157). Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

33.

Inahara

(2009). This body which is not one: The body, femininity and disability. Body & Society, 15, 47-62.

34.

Kobayashi

(2003). GPC ten years on: Is self-reflexivity enough? Gender, Place & Culture, 10, 345-349.

35.

Kobayashi

(2009). Situated knowledge, reflexivity. In Kitchen

Thrift

(Eds.), International encyclopedia of human geography. Oxford, UK: Elsevier.

36.

Kobayashi

Peake

(2000). Racism out of place: Thoughts on whiteness and an antiracist geography in the new millennium. Annals of the American Association of Geographers, 90, 392-403.

37.

Labaree

R. V.

(2002). The risk of “going observationalist”: Negotiating the hidden dilemmas of being an insider participant observer. Qualitative Research, 2(1), 97-122.

38.

Lazzarato

(2008). Art, work and politics in disciplinary societies and societies of security. Radical Philosophy, 149, 1-7.

39.

Lea

(2009). Liberation or limitation? Understanding Iyengar yoga as a practice of the self. Body & Society, 15(3), 71-92.

40.

Lynch

(2000). Against reflexivity as an academic virtue and source of privileged knowledge. Theory, Culture & Society, 17(3), 26-54.

41.

Mahtani

(2002). Tricking the border guards: Performing race. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 20, 425-440.

42.

Mahtani

(2004). Mapping race and gender in the academy: The experiences of women of colour faculty and graduate students in Britain, the US and Canada. Journal of Geography in Higher Education, 28, 91-99.

43.

Massumi

(2002a). Parables for the virtual: Movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

44.

Massumi

(2002b). A shock to thought: Expression after Deleuze and Guattari. New York, NY: Routledge.

45.

Massumi

(2015). Politics of affect. Malden, MA: Polity Press.

46.

Merleau-Ponty

(1945). Phenomenology of perception. Paris, France: Gallimard.

47.

Monroe

K. R.

Chiu

W. F.

(2010). Gender equality in the academy: The pipeline problem. PS: Political Science & Politics, 43, 303-308.

48.

Muhs

G. G. y.

Niemann

Y. F.

González

C. G.

Harris

A. P.

(2012). Presumed incompetent: The intersections of race and class for women in academia. Boulder: University Press of Colorado.

49.

Navarro

(2017). But some of us are broke: Race, gender, and the neoliberalization of the academy. American Anthropologist, 119, 506-517.

50.

Peake

Kobayashi

(2002). Policies and practices for an antiracist geography at the millennium. The Professional Geographer, 54, 50-61.

51.

Pessoa

(2015). Précis on the cognitive-emotional brain. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 38, 1-66.

52.

Prokhovnik

(2002). Rational woman: A feminist critique of dichotomy (2nd ed.). Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press.

53.

Rancière

(2004). The politics of aesthetics: The distribution of the sensible ( Rockhil

, Trans.). New York, NY: Continuum.

54.

Rose

(1997). Situating knowledges: Positionality, reflexivities and other tactics. Progress in Human Geography, 21, 305-320.

55.

Rose

Abi-Rached

J. M.

(2013). Neuro: The new brain sciences and the management of the mind. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

56.

Ruddick

(2010). The politics of affect: Spinoza in the work of Negri and Deleuze. Theory, Culture & Society, 27(4), 21-45.

57.

Shusterman

(2005). Somaesthetics and Burke’s sublime. British Journal of Aesthetics, 45, 323-341.

58.

Smith

L. T.

(2012). Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples (2nd ed.). London, England: Zed Books.

59.

Spinoza

(2000). Ethics ( Parkinson

G. H. R.

, Trans.). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.

60.

Stephens

(2012). Rethinking the Political: Art, Work and the Body in the Contemporary Circus. (Doctor of Philosophy), University of Toronto, Toronto.

61.

Stephens

(2016). The economic lives of circus ‘artists’: Canadian circus performers and the new economy Canadian Journal of Communication, 40, 243-260.

62.

Turner

B. S.

(2008). Somaesthetics and the critique of Cartesian dualism. Body & Society, 14, 129-133.

63.

Wacquant

(2004). Body & soul: Notebooks of an apprentice boxer. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

64.

Williams

(2011). Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of time: A critical introduction and guide. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press.

65.

Williams

(1977). Marxism and literature. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.