Affect, Rhetoric, & The Body | Prof. Bay | Paper #2| October 23, 2019
That affect is a social phenomenon is widely accepted, but details of the functional and structural interplay between the social and affect is still up for discussion. Some see affect as arising from a socially mitigated mood or atmosphere (Heidegger); others see affect as being transmitted socially (Seyfert, Blackman, Tucker) or being inseparable from emotions that are socially situated (Ahmed). Social affect can appear in physical embodiment (Bakare-Yusuf, Blackman, Hawhee, Scarry) or arise in digitally distributed social media (Papacharissi, Sampson et al. Coleman, Tucker). However, a less directly addressed question in the social dimensions of affect is the purview or range of what is considered social, and the meaningful gradations and differences within those situations.
Papacharissi’s Affective Publics is a helpful place from which to start backtracking through the public/private polarity. Here, affect is depicted as “declarative and not deliberative” (114), operating across publicly accessible social media platforms in such a way that “affect is consumed with occupying the body and attaining autonomy through release from it” (14). This view of affect is impressive in its capacity to address many of the social and technological features of public affect, but I’m interested in thinking about how this hyper-public social view of affect might translate to private and quasi-public settings. To do this, it might help to consider additional social theories of affect and what theoretical considerations they attend to most carefully by the examples they analyze.
In its most exaggerated conception, social affect might function like the herd mentality of a crowd or mob which Blackman characterizes as a “susceptibility” (28) or “suggestibility” (43), indicating a kind of volitional vulnerability that members of the crowd experience in a group setting. Ironically, a similar kind “communion of souls” (60) can take place within the confines of telepathic “mental touch;” private social relations characterized, at least in part, by togetherness in the absence of speech—privacy punctuated without words. Affect is bound up in, and perhaps binds together, a wide range of social experiences. In his work toward a theory of social affect, Seyfert develops the term, afectif, which he leverages to mean, “the entirety of all heterogeneous bodies involved in the emergence of an affect” (31). As I understand it, an afectif is a specialized term used to collectively describe all of the different bodies involved in a rhetorically affective situation. New materialists would probably extend afectif to include not only human bodies but also non-human animals and even non-sentient material beings involved in any particular situation. To whom or whatever afectif is extended, Seyfert thinks his contribution to social affect theory is a theory that is not grounded in physical bodies or atmospheres, but rather “sees them as the result of (social!) encounters—they emerge in transitions, interactions, and encounters” (42), and such encounters are always historically situated and predicated.
Many of the contemporary authors we’ve read point back to Spinoza as a the first Western theorist to systematically describe affect as part of his broader social/political and ethical system in which different bodies exist together, and “if we conceive anyone similar to ourselves as affected by any emotion, this conception will express a modification of our body similar to that emotion” (prop XXVII, Ethics). Beyond being the common historical anchor, it seems like Spinoza articulates a profound perennial truth in social affect: that insofar as we can imagine someone else like us experiencing some affect with some particular result, our experience of a similar affect will likely lead to the same kind of result for us. This could be because we imagine the other as we imagine ourselves, but (perhaps more charitably) it could be that by seeking to take the perspective of another, we learn to be affected the way they are. For Ahmed, this perspective-taking can play a particular role when affect is entwined with emotion, specifically shame.
Shame is an emotion with peculiar private/public social features for, as Ahmed succinctly identifies, “Shame as an emotion requires a witness: even if a subject feels shame when in relation to itself “ (105). In other words, shame arises out of a public social affect, even when one is feeling shameful in private. This is because one imagines a witness to one’s shameful deed or puts oneself the in perspective of viewing one’s own shame. The social affect of shame is even more complex when Ahmed theorizes the ways in which collective shame for historical wrongdoing by a society involve a kind of “projection of what is unjust onto the past” so that such shame is borne not by any particular present-day individual, but rather is placed upon an amorphous collectivity—here shame is socially situated to include all of us, but because it is collectivized, none of us feel it. In this case, the social magnitude (an entire society) coupled with temporal distance (events long in the past) allow for a highly social and public discourse of affect to take place without the affect actually manifesting.
Particular social situations range the gamut of public to private—from publicly demonstrating in a street protest with a hand-painted placard (what the French call une manifestastion), to the quasi-public affective space of a classroom or discussion in Black Board; to the highly private and privileged exchanges between therapist and client, confessor and clergy, or lover and beloved. What these situations have in common is a broad sense of social affect, but where they clearly differ is the relative public or private tone of that affect. The collective body (sociality) has long been a puzzle for theorists in terms of its ontology: that which is seemingly singular—the individual person or public body—simultaneously has many personalities or constituent parts (Blackman 56). At the same time the entity/body is clearly differentiated and fragmented it is also singular and unified. I recognize that having many or one makes a difference for privacy (two people can keep a secret, but when three know it’s become public knowledge), so rather than pry at the question of plurality, I’m more interested in riding the line that transitions between public and private affectifs.
“The very function of liminality is to abandon structure so as to permit activity that will result in the birthing of a new structure,” explains Papacharissi, “and therein lie potential empowerment and disempowerment” (125). One place I’ve consistently found this duality of empowerment and disempowerment through entering and abandoning social structures is my work teaching writing and facilitating social groups in jails, prisons, and other correctional institutions. For me this is volunteer work occupies a “third place” which Papacharissi explains is a place other than home or work/school in which “exchange of ideas” happens alongside sharing public news and announcements” by “blending the commercial and alternative, public and private, entertainment and politics, work and leisure” and “individuation and collectivism” (24-5).
For the last ten months, I have been volunteering with a local nonprofit group to facilitate writing and support groups at a local correctional facility. Prior to this, I’ve led writing groups and helped prisoners publish their writing at a correctional facility in California. My groups usually meet weekly; sometimes participants return week after week, and sometimes I only meet them once. Some people have been convicted of serious crimes while others are awaiting trial. I write about these experiences in broad and vague terms to respect their privacy and the privacy of our group meetings. By sharing about our group, this space, and my commitment in this way, my intention is to create an opening for our private social affect without hurling it full-force into the public sphere.
In the private setting of these groups, affect coincides with disclosure; together they produce trust. When I enter these spaces and heavy doors slam behind me, vulnerability also generates trust. The inmates I work with are highly vulnerable by virtue of their being incarcerated. This vulnerability means it would be very hard for me to academize and publish (make public in scholarly affective circuits) the work I do because Institutional Review Boards (IRB) scrutinize research with vulnerable populations intensely. Since I’ve been doing this work voluntarily for a while (and I’ve seen some remarkable personal transformations in both the prisoners and myself), I’m also not sure that I want to change my labor (freely given) into labor in service to my profession. Third place hybrid spaces permit this kind of social interaction in way that an IRB sanctioned experiment would not. And while I have no official data to report or publish from this work, the affective transformations and habituations shape not only my past experiences but also how I perceive and engage in other socially affective public contexts.
Perhaps the most challenging aspect of my extended social milleu is the interplay between different places; different roles I play; identities I project in those places; and ongoing processes of reconciling them—or letting them play as parallel social tracks. Spinoza is known as the great Dutch rationalist philosopher, but his identity, too, was multivalent. To his Dutch contemporaries, he was Baruch Spinoza; he wrote himself into the Latin-speaking Académie as Benedictus de Spinoza; and at birth his Sephardic Jewish parents from Portugal named him Benedito de Espinosa. For those of us who traverse multiple terrains, there is great possibility in inviting “newer civic habits that…democratize by inviting a turn to the affective” (Papacharissi 25) as a way of Being-in multiple social spaces and allowing them to inform each other without losing the fidelity and confidence of the private in the rippling sonorous wavelengths and cascading digital feeds and pages of the publics.