Understanding Depressive Feelings as Situated Affections

Introduction

Both biomedical and phenomenological models agree that depression ¹ involves certain social impairments. On the one hand, the American Psychiatric Association (2013, p. 155) highlights “the presence of sad, empty, or irritable mood, accompanied by somatic and cognitive changes that significantly affect the individual's capacity to function” as the key feature of depressive disorders. On the other, according to different phenomenological accounts (see for example, Bortolan, 2017; Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Fuchs, 2013a; Krueger & Colombetti, 2018; Ratcliffe, 2015, 2018), feelings of detachment and isolation are prominent aspects of experiences of depression. Although different models agree that depression involves social impairments, it is questionable if they all agree on the locus of “social” impairments. Is the impairment located in the individual's mind? Is it her social perception that is impaired? Is the impairment inherent in her subjective experience of herself, others, and the world? Or does this impairment ontologically extend beyond her? Is it embedded in the relation between her and the world? In other words, how “social” are social impairments of depression?

APA's view of depression reflects the idea that social impairment flows from the individual to the world (Ağören, 2017). According to this, the social world involving the individual becomes impaired because the individual is depressed in the first place. Phenomenological models, on the other hand, tend to understand depression as irreducible to the individual since it inevitably transforms experiences of the world (Bortolan, 2017; Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Fuchs, 2013a; Krueger & Colombetti, 2018; Ratcliffe, 2015, 2018). According to this perspective, depression itself is an experience of social disruption, rather than being an individual disorder that impairs the individual's social engagements.

Although phenomenological models of depression significantly challenge the internalist, mentalist and reductionist accounts of depression which still dominate Western clinical practice, they do not openly answer the questions posed above. Thus, their challenge to the individualistic accounts of depression can be complemented via a radical externalist redefinition. This redefinition will be radically externalist by means of locating the social impairment within the individual-environment system. It will suggest that depression is an affective style produced by a system where the individual and the environment constitute a dysfunctional system altogether. This argument applies the 4E ² understanding of world and self as entangled to depression, and it claims that depression is an outcome of a specific world-self interaction which has a deteriorating effect upon the individual. In this specific context, the individual's everyday affective experience becomes disrupted not through a disorder but as an embodied transformation emerging in an environment resisting being manipulated through “scaffolds of affectivity” (Colombetti & Krueger, 2015, p. 1166) ³ . This redefinition not only shifts the focus from the individual to the system involving the individual, but also calls for an exploration of the world's phenomenological enactment in the ontogenesis of depression. It is radically externalist compared to the current phenomenological models, as it aims to cover not only the experience of depression but also its development and function within the individual-environment system.

Phenomenologists of depression commonly observe that social impairments involved in depression are affective; they consist of an alternating affective relation between the individual and the world (Bortolan, 2017; Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Fuchs, 2013a; Krueger & Colombetti, 2018; Ratcliffe, 2015, 2018). Hence, this discussion will heavily focus on affectivity. The main question I aim to answer here will be whether social impairments emerging throughout depression are reducible to an affective disorder or if depression is a certain affective style produced by an impaired social world. As I will illustrate later, some phenomenological models of depression, such as Fuchs (2013a), seem to be based upon a dichotomy of daily affectivity as in-touch-ness with the world and depressive affectivity as out-of-touch-ness from it. In Fuchs' (2013a) understanding, while daily affections are viewed as embodied communication between self and the world, depression corresponds to a disability blocking this affective communication. Here I suggest that, though in depression daily affectivity becomes disrupted, the individual's affective capacity is not altogether lost. Depression is an experience of various affections, and hence we may conceptualize depression as a certain affective style which is embedded in the individual's subjective situatedness, rather than an affective disability. This affective style emerges not as an individual disability to connect with the world, but as an affective response produced in a system where everyday affections are rendered dysfunctional to connect with the world. To develop this argument further, first I will visit the concept of situated affectivity along with Gallagher’s (2013, p. 4) notion of “socially extended mind”, and Krueger’s (forthcoming) and Maiese’s (2018) works on deteriorating environments; and second I will introduce Fuchs’ (2013a) model of depression. I will follow this trajectory to exhibit the dichotomy of everyday affectivity as a self-world communication and depression as a disruption of this communication. Finally, I will challenge this dichotomy through the argument that depression is a situated affective phenomenon, despite the recognition that affections of depression are substantially different in content from everyday affections. Throughout the text, I will refer to literary and autobiographical material reflecting the affective nature of experiences of depression to support my original argument.

Situated Affectivity

Various phenomenological models of affectivity argue that affective phenomena extend beyond the individual: they arise from the individual's situatedness in the world (see, for example Colombetti, 2013; Colombetti & Krueger, 2015; Colombetti & Roberts, 2015; Froese & Fuchs, 2012; Fuchs, 2013b; Fuchs & Koch, 2014; Griffiths & Scarantino, 2008; Schmitz et al., 2011; Slaby, 2017). Situatedness has been used as a concept to define an individual's inextricable connection to her environment (Rohlfing et al., 2003). When conceived as situated, affectivity corresponds to “a form of being open to the world in a radical sense” (p. 7), rather than an inner psychological capacity to feel (Slaby, 2017). Therefore, affectivity is irreducible to the feeling individual's internal private domain. Affections are not produced by the brain but are “brought forth by the whole organism embedded in its environment” (Colombetti, 2013, p. 1094). Hence, the locus of affections is not the individual, but couplings of the individual with others, objects, and institutions.

From this perspective, the world is not a passive object that is felt. It is “always charged with affective qualities” (Fuchs, 2013b, p. 613). Thus, it is not the individual isolated from her environment but the “integrated system” (Colombetti & Roberts, 2015, p. 1260) that feels. ⁴ Although this illustrates the active involvement of the environment in the genesis of affections, it does not necessarily relegate the individual to the passive position of being affected. Colombetti and Krueger (2015) claim that an individual plays an active part in shaping her affections; she manipulates and engineers the environment to scaffold her affective experience. She is capable of interfering with the material agency enforcing affects upon her. For instance, she may choose to turn off the blues record or open the curtains if the atmosphere inside her room becomes gloomy.

According to this perspective, the material world plays an important part in the genesis of affectivity, but it may be useful to clarify what this material world consists of. I argue here that a distinction between materiality and sociality of the immediate environment is not inevitable. It is possible that they exist as mashed together inextricably. For example, entering a governmental or institutional building in an oppressive country may cause feelings such as restrictedness. This feeling involves, as an integral element, the awareness of the strict normative control over one's actions. Yet, this awareness is not independent from the material qualities of the building, but rather supported by them. Designed in a monotone and concrete structure, such buildings embody qualities of orderliness, stability, and authority that impose on citizens the awareness of being under control and feeling of restrictedness ⁵ . By framing the material world in this manner, we move away from the idea of stiff materiality towards the idea of materiality absorbent of the individual’s situatedness.

At this point, Gallagher’s (2013, p. 4) concept of “socially extended mind” helps to further develop this idea and to clarify the content of the social phenomena that is absorbed by the immediate environment. Gallagher (2013) made a vital contribution to 4E studies through the term “socially extended mind”; he offered a “critical twist” (p. 12) by highlighting that cognition is shaped by/in institutions. This was a point which had remained rather unexplored, as 4E studies focused mostly on the face-to-face interpersonal field and the immediate material environment. Based on Gallagher's conception of socially extended mind it may be plausible to propose that the immediate environment is not exhaustive of the material and micro-social elements; social factors that belong to macro-levels (such as, social norms, cultural conventions, ideals and meanings, institutional rules and settings, political/economic/cultural backgrounds) are also found embedded.

While Gallagher (2013) developed his theory specifically on cognition, in this paper I apply his theory to affectivity and suggest that our relations with social and cultural institutions not only shape our cognition, but they also constitute the ground in which our situated affective experience is rooted. Our history with the surrounding social organization reaches us through the objects and matters present in our immediate environment, and therefore engage with us and affect us on a corporeal level through visions, smells, textures and sounds as elements of “here and now” (Menary, 2010, p. 3). Through his analysis of Heideggerian thought, Slaby (2017) makes a similar point. He claims that in Heideggerian understanding “[a]ffect is a central conduit for how the past prevails within the texture of the present—for how it comes to matter again and again in ongoing comportment” (p. 8). All in all, situated affectivity emerges in an immediate environment that accommodates interactions between past and present individuals, institutions, meanings, objects, and places.

My purpose here is to argue that this is true not only for everyday affectivity; depression may also be an affective emergent of such a process. Although there is a tendency in the phenomenology of depression literature to view depression as an experience of disrupted affectivity, here I suggest that depression may be an extended affective phenomenon which arises from an impaired social world. We find ourselves experiencing daily affections when we find ourselves situated in a world which is responsive to communication and open to be manipulated. We become sad and disappointed not only in the face of distressing events, but also in a world that accommodates us acting through our sadness and disappointment. Yet, in some cases the world may lose its approachable character. It may become rigid and obstinate, resistant to manipulation and closed to communication. What effects may such environmental elements have on our experience of ourselves and our relation to the world?

Other phenomenologists (see for example, Krueger, forthcoming and Maiese, 2018) have explored how certain environmental elements may have a dismissive character and a negative impact upon the individual's cognitive and affective capacities. Whereas Maiese (2018) described some institutional settings that “contribute to maladaptive habits of mind that alienate people from deep-rooted human needs and interfere with overall well-being” (p. 6); Krueger (forthcoming, p. 8) introduced the concept of “atmospheres of exclusion” to suggest that certain “affective arrangements … can disturb and disorient bodies, and dramatically limit or close down possibilities for action and social connection”. Along similar lines, I argue here that depression may be an affective style cultivated by, not a specific institution or atmosphere, but a social web encompassing the individual's personal history in the world. Some individuals find themselves in contexts that refuse their bodies, reject their communication, or disable their self-fulfillment. Sometimes these contexts are rather definable, suitable to be singled out from the larger context and relatively easy to move away from. For example, Maiese's (2018) analysis focuses on universities ruled by neoliberal ideals, and Krueger’s (forthcoming) is based on atmospheres tied to specific spaces. Additionally, we can think of systems that are constitutionally disabling, which are harder to step out of or alter. ⁶ What would our affective experience be like in such a world? What happens when our everyday affections are rendered dysfunctional in such a context? Here, I consider such systems to have a depressogenic influence. ⁷ When it is not a specific place, but the world in general that loses its elasticity to be engineered by the individual's attempts to exist attuned, depressive affections replace everyday affections. If efficiently channeled, they may function by generating an active withdrawal from an environment that has lost its plasticity and responsiveness to everyday affections and has become resistant to significant change. Through this drastic withdrawal, the individual may either force the system to produce an environmental response or exhibit a drastic detachment which could be followed by a readaptation to a new system. All in all, depression may even be functional for the sustainment of individual's agency.

I will further explore this point below, but prior to this, I will introduce Fuchs’ (2013a) model of depression. This will provide (1) an understanding of the affective alteration experienced through depression and (2) a ground to discuss whether this alteration corresponds to an impairment of certain affective capacities or to a particular affective style which is produced by the individual-environment system.

Depression as a Loss of Affectivity

The focus of this section will be Fuchs (2013a, p. 226) argument that “depression [i]s a disorder of intercorporeality and interaffectivity”. To be able to analyze this statement, first I will explore his grasp of body and world. Second, I will present his account of affections, intercorporeality and interaffectivity. Last, I will briefly describe his phenomenological understanding of depression.

To start, Fuchs’ main phenomenological standpoint is Merleau-Ponty's well-known statement that body is the medium through which the world is experienced. According to this, affective qualities of the world reach us through our bodies. Through embodied affections, we actualize the environment's affective potential. Furthermore, our bodies affectively resonate in the world with other bodies. As well as receiving the affective charge loaded in the environment, we also catch others’ affective states. We synchronize with the world together with others; we share our world in a way by sharing affections (Froese & Fuchs, 2012; Fuchs, 2013a, 2013b; Fuchs & Koch, 2014).

This brings the discussion to Fuchs (2013a, p. 223) fundamental concepts: interaffectivity and intercorporeality. Interaffectivity refers to the idea that our affections are not exclusively ours; they are interpersonally formed and shared. They are embedded not in our private mental worlds, but in the external world containing us and our relations to other affective/affected beings. Intercorporeality refers to the idea that affections are interpersonally embodied. Through our bodily-affective states we communicate and form an embodied “resonance” (Fuchs, 2013a, p. 222) with others.

Where does depression stand in this framework? According to Fuchs (2013a, p. 226) “depression [i]s a disorder of intercorporeality and interaffectivity”. Whereas the body is normally a transparent medium through which the world and the self reach out for each other, when depressed it becomes impervious. Its heaviness and fleshiness stand in the way of an affective communication with the world. The depressed body does not resonate with others; it does not embody the world's affective qualities. The usual embodied affections of being in certain situations do not emerge. This creates a feeling of isolation. Due to the body's stiffness, the world becomes untouchable, unrelatable, and exclusionary. This inability to experience the world's affective charge through her own body brings up a feeling of being stuck in a body which is not alive anymore but is sole inert matter. The stiffened body renders the world impossible to act in. The corporeality of the body becomes something to be defeated to be able to perform the simplest chores. This is called “corporealization” (Fuchs, 2013a, p. 226). Through corporealization the empathic involvement in the world of others made possible by intercorporeality and interaffectivity is abruptly blocked.

As this illustrates, in Fuchs (2013a) view, daily affectivity is irreducibly interpersonal, whereas depression is a disruption of the ability to affectively engage with the world and others. Hence, depression cannot be reduced to mental symptoms. It involves a substantial alteration of the world one finds herself in, and at the core of this there is an altered sense of her own body. This is a crucial contribution for understanding the presence of depression outside of the skull and it provides a practical tool to overcome the mentalist and reductionist connotations attached to the term depression (Bialek, 2019). To strengthen this non-reductionist conception of depression, I will offer a more radically externalist redefinition. This redefinition will propose a shift from understanding depression as an impairment of affectivity to understanding it as an affective style produced in a socially impaired world.

Depressive Feelings as Situated Affections

Here, I will explore the system in which intercorporeal and interaffective experience becomes impaired. This analysis will eventually serve to understand depression as an extended affective phenomenon, which is not only experientially but also ontologically irreducible to the individual. To proceed, first I will challenge the categorical distinction between everyday versus pathological affectivity from a phenomenological perspective. ⁸ This challenge will question the urge to understand depressive feelings as arising from a disrupted affective communication between self and the world. Following this, I will redefine depressive feelings as affections and hence (1) situated and (2) functional for environmental manipulation (in this case a withdrawal from the depressogenic environment). At this point, I will refer to Butler’s (1997) concept of “gay melancholia” as a case supporting this argument. Next, I will revisit Fuchs’ concept of corporealization to define the affective experience of an organism withdrawn from an environment not affording affective scaffolds. Finally, I will briefly discuss the therapeutic implications of the radical externalist model I proposed here. Throughout the discussion, I will refer to literary and autobiographical material reflecting the affective nature of experiences of depression to support my original argument.

To start, a categorical distinction between everyday affectivity and affective disorders may seem functional to manage mental suffering. Clinical practice requires this distinction as a ground to act upon, to be able to detect experiences demanding intervention and treatment. Yet, unless psychological health and disease are taken as “natural kinds” (Hacking, 1999, p. 104), the distinction needs to be justified before it is applied in phenomenological research. Foucault (1976) claimed that it is a Western tradition to attribute deviance to mental illness and to “seek the origin of the morbid in the abnormal” (p. 63). Accordingly, conceptualizing mental suffering as a pathology and defining the individual as the locus of explanation, treatment, and emergence of this pathology relate to a cultural bias. Here, I challenge this bias.

My aim is not to criticize the understanding of depression as experientially distinct from everyday affections, such as sadness and hopelessness. Quite the contrary, I readily acknowledged that experiences of depression substantially differ from everyday affective experience. This point has already been compellingly established by phenomenologists of depression, such as Ratcliffe (2015), who has argued that the vocabulary of everyday affections is insufficient to articulate feelings of depression and that a novel vocabulary is needed to be able to start understanding what depression feels like. Yet, notwithstanding that depressive feelings differ from everyday affections in content, it does not follow that they are necessarily different kinds. Experiences of depression are generally defined through the loss of daily affections (see for instance, Fuchs, 2013a and Ratcliffe, 2015), and the prominence of loss of usual feelings and affections in experiences of depression is nothing to be argued against. Yet, I suggest here that this void itself may be framed in affective terms. For instance, the feeling of disconnectedness (a key aspect of experiences of depression according to phenomenologists of depression such as Bortolan, 2017; Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Fuchs, 2013a; Krueger & Colombetti, 2018; Ratcliffe, 2015, 2018) is not necessarily conceived as a state of non-feeling. It is true that it involves the absence of usual connectedness, yet we may still define disconnectedness as an affect in itself. Rather than corresponding to a disrupted ability to feel connected, disconnectedness may originally emerge in a world not affording the embodied feeling of connectedness. In her autobiographical work The Bell Jar, Plath (1971, p. 15) offers a clear narration of the emergence of disconnectedness in a world not affording her participation in an instance of romantic intimacy:

There is something demoralizing about watching two people get more and more crazy about each other, especially when you are the only extra person in the room. It’s like watching Paris from an express caboose heading in the opposite direction-every second the city gets smaller and smaller, only you feel it’s really you getting smaller and smaller and lonelier and lonelier, rushing away from all those lights and that excitement at about a million miles an hour.

All in all, here I argue that experience of depression is affective; it holds a certain communicative nature between world and the individual. This may initially occur controversial, since affections are not exclusively ours (Fuchs, 2013a), and yet depression seems to be, by means of constituting an ultimate subjective experience of isolation and disrupted co-existence. It is important to remember, as Gallagher and Zahavi (2008, p. 123) write, that “[t]he subjective is not inside the mind and the objective is not outside of it”. Both subjectivity and intersubjectivity emerge throughout our histories involving the world. Some aspects of these histories are shared by others, some are not similarly shared. Yet, their non-shared nature does not reduce their locus to the skull, since the world still enacts in their emergence.

If feelings of depression are affections, then they entail the world. This suggestion may seem problematic as depression is not always triggered by social/environmental causes. ¹⁰ Yet, here my intention is not to make such claim. Rather, my argument is that depression is “irreducibly social” (Ağören, 2017); it is embedded in the individual-environment system. When I argue for the worldly, social, and extended nature of depression, I refer to life itself, rather than a certain life event. As Woolf (1960, p. 81) elegantly puts in Jacob's Room, “[i]t's not catastrophes, murders, deaths, diseases, that age and kill us; it's the way people look and laugh, and run up the steps of omnibuses”. According to this, it is not tragedies that are materialized as depressogenic substance in daily objects, gestures, and practices that Woolf addressed; it is the traces of our personal history, our relations to others and our subjective situatedness in the world. Therefore, the absence of a detectable external cause is not enough to rule out the environmental involvement in the ontogenesis of depression. Similar to everyday affections, depressive affections may be imposed on us by our immediate environment without being divided into individual and definable factors presenting themselves as causes of depression.

As phenomenological studies (see for example, Bortolan, 2017; Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Fuchs, 2013a; Krueger & Colombetti, 2018; Ratcliffe, 2015, 2018) illustrate, depression involves embodied feelings of isolation, abandonment, and detachment. Once these feelings are conceived as situated affections, their genesis may be linked to an individual-environment system dysfunctional for sustaining belongingness. Based on the following passage written by Plath (1971, p. 62), it is plausible to claim that a system as such would consist of individual and environmental elements that are out-of-tune: “I felt like a racehorse in a world without racetracks or a champion college footballer suddenly confronted by Wall Street and a business suit”. Here, the world described by Plath does not seem to afford the individual a way to fit in harmonically or to participate. In cases like this, interaffective and intercorporeal experience may be blocked, not by an individual disorder, but by the disharmony between the individual and the environment.

The theme of disharmony similarly emerges in Coelho’s (2006, p. 25) Veronica Decides to Die:

Oddly enough I never used to suffer from depression on cold, gray, cloudy days like this. I felt as if nature was in harmony with me, that it reflected my soul. On the other hand, when the sun appeared, the children would come out to play in the streets, and everyone was happy that it was such a lovely day, and then I would feel terrible, as if that display of exuberance in which I could not participate was somehow unfair.

This point brings the discussion to another important issue. As Colombetti and Krueger (2015) note, affections are not individuated experiences of being passively affected by the world. Affections open ways through which the individual actively engineers the world. One may argue that this is why depressive feelings relate to a pathology of affectivity. As Fuchs (2013a) establishes, a depressed human being loses her capability to actively engage with the world. Her affective state does not seem to be capable of initiating any way for a significant interaction between the self and the world. According to this, the basic in-touch-ness with the world that is central for everyday affectivity is missing in depression.

As a response, I propose the following argument: the passive affective state lived through depression may be an active affective withdrawal from an environment not responding to the individual's attempts for environmental manipulation. Above, I introduced Colombetti and Krueger’s (2015) idea that we scaffold our affections through environmental manipulation. Yet, one may suggest that affectivity can be environmentally scaffolded only when the involved environment is suitable for manipulation. As I argued before, the material environment is absorbent of the individual's situatedness in a macro-leveled social organization. Following Gallagher’s (2013) concept of socially extended mind, we may suggest that by engaging with things and others around us, we also engage with institutions, norms, ideals, values, etc. It is in such a socio-physical world that we sometimes find it impossible to manipulate certain aspects of our surroundings. Through the quoted passage below, Plath (1971, p. 85) vividly illustrates how it becomes impossible to engage with certain objects when depressed:

It was becoming more and more difficult for me to decide to do anything in those last days. And when I actually did decide to do something, such as packing a suitcase, I only dragged all my grabby, expensive clothes out of the bureau and the closet and spread them on the chairs and the bed and the floor and then sat and staired at them, utterly perplexed. They seemed to have a separate, mulish identity of their own that refused to be washed and folded and stowed.

In her world, clothes stand out as a crucial medium through which ideals of femininity are actualized. Yet, as much as the ideal of femininity materialized in her expensive New Yorker clothes is imposed upon her by the world she finds herself in, it also rejects her. As much as she describes a feeling of being indulged by the clothes to join a glamorous New York life as a young, single, free woman, she also describes a disharmony between herself and this ideal. Whether or not she desires to conquer this ideal, she feels refused by it. She owns and wears the clothes in which this ideal is materialized, yet this does not suffice for her to feel accomplished. This ideal of femininity resists being incorporated by her through the material agency performed by the clothes. Her attempts to engineer her affective environment through interacting with clothes fail, since her world financially, personally, or historically does not afford the embodiment of this ideal. Thus, her struggle with clothes involves her struggle with this ideal: what Plath described as impossible to manage and manipulate was the ideals of femininity materialized as clothes of differing prices, textures, colors, and styles.

Let us discuss a less subtle example of an environment too stiff to be engineered for scaffolding affectivity as this would enable us to contextualize the idea of a depressogenic world. Feeling disappointed in one's job may be altered through environmental engineering only if the environment is significantly responsive to the individual's initiations. Disappointment may motivate someone to alter her employment status or at least to reduce the gravity of her job in her life, yet it is unlikely that this may itself be enough to make a significant change. The impersonalized institutional structure of the workplace and socio-economic obstacles are among many possible factors that may render the environment unresponsive to her attempts. If everyday affections occur in the condition of meaningful individual-environment communication, in an unresponsive environment disappointment may never even occur in the first place. One may get depressed, before the unsatisfactory employment condition establishes itself as a cause in her experience. From this perspective, depression could be an active affective withdrawal from an environment which is too stiff to be engineered and gives no affirmative feedback to individual's initiation to exist attuned.

When the passage quoted earlier from Coelho (2006, p. 25) is reviewed from this perspective, depression results as a product of a system insistently imposing a shared happiness upon the individual and refusing to recognize her disappointment with life. Similarly,Tolstoy’s (1983) Anna Karenina lives in a world not responding to her hatred and offering no affordance for environmental manipulation: “What are those churches, that ringing, and these lies for? Only to conceal the fact that we all hate each other” (753). This manifests the institutionalized and materialized aspects of environment which force a way of being upon Anna Karenina from which she is affectively repelled. Yet, her hatred becomes inadequate to manipulate the environment, since she is embedded in a rigid social structure which allows her neither to make a change nor to flee without further trouble. This appears to be a clear reflection of the “socially extended” (Gallagher, 2013, p. 4) nature of her depression.

In line with this, Tezer Özlü, a Turkish author who was diagnosed with manic-depression, expresses the affections of being in a world resistant to change:

I know nothing more horrifying and hopeless than the feeling that nothing will ever change. It will. Just like mountains, seas, oceans, lakes, meadows, steppes and deserts, riverbeds, icebergs, cities and villages of earth change: so will human relations. There will be a time where one is not expected to be occupied with things that are not in line with her instincts. ¹¹ (Özlü, 2014, p. 59)

Butler’s (1997, p. 147) analysis of “gay melancholia” is another helpful example to illustrate the idea of a constitutionally impaired world ¹² . Butler builds her theory upon the Freudian notion of mourning and melancholia. According to this, sexual desire directed towards socially unacceptable objects is redirected towards socially acceptable objects, and hence separation from the original object is executed. This is called mourning. Yet, some objects are not suitable for a healthy resolution. In such cases when the individual cannot externalize the object, she internalizes and suppresses it. Here, melancholia replaces mourning. Butler suggests that homosexual desire is unresolvable through mourning because in a heterosexist-patriarchal society, it is the homosexual desire itself, and not its object, that is against the social norm. One cannot simply direct this desire to a different object, and hence experience a healthy separation from the original object. Therefore, she is forced to reject homosexual desire altogether, rather than to resolve it, and this results in melancholia (Ağören, 2020).

By exhibiting a psychosocial origin of depression, Butler (1997) supports the notion that depression is inextricably bound up with the social structure. Furthermore, she exposes the stiff nature of the macro-structure in which depression is embedded. The early cognition of a conflict between the ego and social norms constitutes a depressogenic world. Some may find it useful to move out of their current social circle, change jobs, join LGBTQ+ communities, etc. Yet, these acts may not always be possible or meaningful. Presence of institutional heteronormativity and homophobia, financial disabilities, lack of information about LGBTQ+ communities, or socio-psychological interdependence between one and her significant others are among many reasons why an individual cannot possibly step out of a depressogenic environment. In this case, the individual finds herself situated in a system rendering attuned being impossible. Thus, instead of generating affections through which the environment is engineered to sustain harmony; the system produces depressive affections which foresee a drastic break.

Now Fuchs' (2013a) account of depression may be reexamined. There is still no controversy that sufferers of depression are not affected by the world as they previously had been, or that they cannot share others’ affective states. Yet, what is impaired in this case is not necessarily the affective relation between individual and environment. Depressive feelings may be affections generated by an impaired world as exemplified above.

The following passage from Tolstoy (1983, pp. 753–754) illustrates an affective communication between Anna Karenina and her surroundings emerging at the peak of her depression: “She wished to get away as soon as possible from the feelings she experienced in that terrible house. The servants, the walls, the tidings in the house, all repelled and angered her, and oppressed her like a weight”. In this world, things, others, places lose their welcoming quality. They do not call the individual to indulge in a shared world: to actualize, create, change, and evolve in this world. They do not reach her flesh in an attractive manner. Yet, they still reach her flesh, though in a drastically different way. They repulse, push, and expel her. This world does not involve or invite, and therefore does not accommodate interaffective and intercorporeal experience. Corporealization emerges in this world as an individuated, embodied experience of being expelled. From this perspective, corporealization does not render the world impossible to act in, but vice versa; corporealization is imposed upon the individual in a world which does not afford any act which may generate significant change. Corporealization is existential in terms of being “already” (Ratcliffe, 2015, p. 35) present in the individual's experience before she finds herself in situations from which she feels expelled. Yet it is not pre-social. The individual feels expelled from a system, because she already has a sense of the world bereft of affordances through her social, cultural, institutional, economical, gendered, and political situatedness within it.

The relation between depression and affordances has been studied before (see Bruineberg & Rietveld, 2014; Krueger & Colombetti, 2018). In Bruineberg and Rietveld’s (2014, p. 11) work depression was related to a “flat field of affordance”. Initially, their argument may occur in line with the current thesis, yet their definition of depression as a mood disorder “distort[ing] the field of affordance” sharply contrasts with the radical externalist redefinition developed here. According to this redefinition, depression does not involve an impaired perception of the world as if bereft of possibilities. Rather, it involves corporealization as an affect generated by a world that is in fact bereft of possibilities. This is not only because a depressed individual goes through an “existential change” (Ratcliffe, 2015, p. 36) which disallows her to find meaning in life, but because the surrounding world does not afford such meaning to be actualized. She finds herself a corporealized organism affectively withdrawn from a socially impaired system that does not afford attuned being.

Krueger and Colombetti (2018) also examined the “affordance space” alternating throughout depression. They suggest that depression consists of an impairment in the environment's function for regulating affectivity. According to this, a depressed individual cannot access the elements of her environment to scaffold her affective experience resulting in a shrinkage of affordances. As an alternative, I suggest viewing depression as an affective style regulated by a world resistant to manipulation. A depressogenic world does not afford any act to sustain harmony within the system, and hence the system deteriorates itself by generating depressive affections through which the individual withdraws from the environment. An expression of such a deterioration was made by Young Werther, a classical literary example of a depressed and suicidal character:

My heart is wasted by the thought of that destructive power which lies concealed in every part of universal nature. Nature has formed nothing that does not consume itself, and every object near it: so that, surrounded by earth and air, and all the active powers, I wander on my way with aching heart; and the universe is to me a fearful monster, for ever devouring its own offspring. (Goethe, 2009)

This may propose implications for treatment as well. Through the current clinical practice, depressive symptoms are treated on an individual level. Yet, based on the proposed model, this reductionist approach pushes the individual to rejoin a system which has tried to expel her. Even if the symptoms are relieved via medication or therapy, the same system may eventually generate the same phenomenon. This may explain why treatment for depression has been so inefficient (Moncrieff, 2008) and recurrence is significantly high (Burcusa & Iacano, 2007). In this case, it could be helpful to develop therapy techniques (combined with psychopharmaceutical, psychosurgical or other medical interventions when necessary) which involve working with the individual to create functional ways to break from the dysfunctional system and to adapt to a new system which would respond to her attempts to exist attuned.

Conclusion

To conclude, the growing literature of phenomenology suggests that experience of depression extends beyond the individual and involves crucial social impairments. Yet, the conception of social impairment still requires clarification. In this paper, I aimed to establish the situated, extended, and affective nature of social impairments involved in depression, and hence to complement the current literature. To achieve this, first I questioned the dichotomy of everyday affections as ways of being-in-touch with the world and depression as an affective disorder blocking the relation between the self and the world. No phenomenological ground seems to justify the idea that everyday affections are different from depressive feelings in terms of being embedded in an individual-environment system. Based on the analysis of literary and autobiographical texts as well as the case of gay melancholia, it may be argued that in the case of depression, this system would be composed of elements that are (1) out-of-tune, (2) unresponsive to affective communication, and hence (3) resistant to meaningful change which could sustain individual-environment harmony. In this system, depression emerges as an affective style functioning in an active affective withdrawal from an environment which is unresponsive to the individual's attempts to exist attuned. When her affections are rendered dysfunctional for environmental manipulation by the rigid institutional structure encompassing her ongoing history in the world, a development of depression initiates an affective withdrawal from this dysfunctional system.