Beyond Personal Feelings and Collective Emotions: Toward a Theory of Social Affect

Abstract

In the Sociology of Emotion and Affect Studies, affects are usually regarded as an aspect of human beings alone, or of impersonal or collective atmospheres. However, feelings and emotions are only specific cases of affectivity that require subjective inner selves, while the concept of ‘atmospheres’ fails to explain the singularity of each individual case. This article develops a theory of social affect that does not reduce affect to either personal feelings or collective emotions. First, I use a Spinozist understanding of the ‘body’ to conceptualize the receptivity and mutual constitution of bodies, to show how affects do not ‘belong’ to anybody; they are not solely attributable either to the human or to any kind of body alone, but emerge in situations of the encounter and interaction (between bodies). Next I build upon Jean-Marie Guyau’s concept of transmissions to show how we can theorize affect as an emerging transmission between and among bodies. Finally, I demonstrate how we now have a complete conceptual frame for theorizing affect in relation to all bodies in any given social scene, the grand composition of which I call affectif.

What can bodies do? Reading Spinoza for an affective ethics of organizational life

“…This is no obvious choice. Spinoza's convoluted style and contradictory arguments have enabled several competing interpretations: (i) Spinoza's geometric method of logical deduction and discussion of the virtues of reason has led mainstream historians of philosophy and analytic philosophers to view Spinoza as a rationalist (Bennett, 1984;Hampshire, 1951;Koistinen, 2009); (ii) liberalist commentators in political philosophy have taken Spinoza's emphasis on the freedom of thought as a precurse to the 18th century Enlightenment (Israel, 2007) and economic liberalism (Feuer, 1958;Smith, 1997); (iii) neo--Marxists have celebrated Spinoza's implicit emphasis on class antagonism (Althusser, 1970) while post--Marxists have reiterated the Spinozian multitude as a subject of political resistance and transformation (Hardt and Negri, 2004); and (iv) the affective turn in cultural and social thought has, among other things, utilized Spinoza to theorize social affect beyond the dualism of personal feelings and collective emotions (Seyfert, 2012).…”

Affect—or feeling (after Leys)

“…As Seyfert (2012) notes, affects emerge in situations of encounter and interaction between bodies (both human and non-human) and, therefore, cannot be reduced to any individual. He coins the term affectif "to capture this social and heteronomous quality of affect and affective bodies" (Seyfert, 2012, p. 33).…”

Disembodied Voice and Embodied Affect: e-Reading in Early Childhood Education

“…Coleman & Ringrose, 2013;Knudsen & Stage, 2015;Seyfert, 2012) entails exploring what is happening in the classroom and what makes people do/not do things. In highlighting the active outcome of the social-material encounters happening between the young readers, the e-book and the text, this article explores how these encounters produce processes of e-reading that may, or may not, prompt a drive for reading.…”