’affect arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon’ (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1)
Why do I prefer to approach fashion as an uncertain, open and affective economy (Ahmed, 2004) rather than merely an aesthetic one (Entwistle, 2002, 2009)? Although aesthetics should not be reduced to vision or ‘mere’ decorative surface,
this has often been the case. I believe that the intense, embodied, expressive, elusive and emotionally vested notion of fashion cannot be problematized further from a purely discursive, symbolic, semiotic, aesthetic or materialistic point of view. Also, I agree with Keevers and Sykes (2016, 6) who notice that ’the effects of affect are evident both within bodies and in social and political phenomena and, accordingly, are part of what constitute everyday organizing practices’. By departing from our embodied experiences and by taking affect seriously, we might actually ‘unveil how the social is experienced and negotiated through the body’ (Adamson and Johansson, 2016, 6). The phenomenology debate seems to be a fruitful way of gaining deeper understandings of the versatile processes of fashion, including that of doing fashion or making fashionable clothing objects.
Today, ‘the literature addressing aspects of affect is extensive’, Thompson and Willmott (2015, 3) remind us. Even if affect is currently becoming one of the more fashionable notions in the social sciences, this is not why I have turned to it now.16 Rather, I work from the assumption that affect highlights
the inter-connectedness of social forces and lived embodied experiences through inter-relations between bodies (Adamson and Johansson, 2016). Here, I work from the assumption that sensing and seeing are closely connected to embodied experience, feeling, affection,17 emotions and memory. In the constitution
of embodiment, relationality and context play a significant part (Adamsson and Johansson, 2016): the body is not separated from an external objective reality; rather, the body ‘is both acted upon and active, both situated and situating’ (Casey, 1993), and always in a relationship with others (Satama and Huopalainen, 2016; Trigg, 2013). According to Hansen (2001, 83), a ‘fundamental shift in the “economy” of perception from vision to bodily
16 At least two essays are widely regarded as cornerstones for the emerging interest in affects in the academic realm. These include Sedwick’s and Frank’s (1995) Shame in the
Cybernetic Fold and Brian Massumi’s (1995) The Autonomy of Affect. Moreover, Jokinen
and Venäläinen (2015) discuss three central strands of affect theory, and I want to mention these briefly. These include Tomkins’ psychological theorizing from the 1960s, Massumi’s material-processual theory on the potential of affect based upon readings of Spinoza and Deleuze, and feminist influences on the study of affect.
17 In this thesis, I conceptualize affection as the process of affecting and being affected (see Oxford English Dictionary).
affectivity’ has relatively recently occurred. In my understanding, this shift is grounded in a phenomenological epistemology of the body (Merleau-Ponty, 1962) that theorizes the self as always already situated, embodied and inter- connected in the world (see also Mirza, 2013; Young, 1980). In other words, a phenomenological epistemology highlights a co-constitutive relationship between the lived, experiential body and the society (Dale, 2001) around her. Here, I conceptualize lived experiences broadly as ‘the body’s interactions with itself, with others, and with the world’ (Weiss, 1999, 119).
An ‘affective turn’ has occurred within the fields of feministic studies, cultural studies and sociological studies (e.g. Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b; Clough, 2007a, 2007b; Sedwick, 2003), and what we understand by such a turn is – usually – a manifold of theoretical developments and directions (Jokinen and Venäläinen, 2015). Here, a turn is not understood as a turn ‘away’ from something, but rather as rethinking and re-visioning feelings of scholarship. Moreover, what does the ambivalent term ‘affect’ refer to here, and how do I conceptualize affect in the context of this thesis? I am well aware of the many different theorizations of affects in both the field of organization studies as well as the social sciences more broadly. For instance, Seigworth and Gregg (2010, 1) approach ‘affect’ as ‘the name we give to those forces – visceral forces, beneath, alongside or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us towards movement, toward thought and extension’. To me, affect relates to felt, emotional and embodied ways of sensing, feeling and experiencing moment-by-moments in the world, which provides a much-needed reaction to distant, disembodied, linguistic or ‘linear’ constructions. Widely informed by the phenomenology of the body, disability studies, psychoanalytics, cybernetics and Spinozan processual philosophy, only to name a few important theoretical approaches (see Seigworth and Gregg, 2010; Venäläinen and Jokinen, 2015), the study of affects is currently gaining ever- growing scholarly interest, also in the realm of organization studies (e.g. Beyes and Steyaert, 2013; Borch, 2010; Fotaki et al., 2012; Kenny, 2012; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015; Vachhani, 2013; Thanem and Wallenberg, 2015; Thompson and Willmott, 2015).
Following Thompson and Willmott (2015), I conceptualize affects as intense, intersubjective, intertwined and relational forces. By affects, I understand specific yet shifting, intense and sensible auras, atmospheres, tones or spirits that
are subjectively experienced socio-material flows throughout the body, yet are interdependent on other bodies for their circulation (e.g. Ahmed, 2004a, 2004b; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015). Specifically, I view affects in line with Jokinen and Venäläinen (2015, 221) as ‘intensities that both bind humans (and even things) together and divide them’ apart. These interdependent forces ‘can either lead to unexpected potentials or they can get captured’ (ibid, 221). Affects connect us and perform powerful multilayered means of experienced, embodied, sensitive
and non-verbal communication. In this sense, I view an affective approach as a much-needed, more mobile, processual and ‘non-mainstream’ alternative to perception and knowledge more generally. Meanwhile, affects closely connect to subjectivity, agency and embodiment (e.g. Jokinen and Venäläinen, 2015; Stewart, 2007; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015; Thompson and Willmott, 2015). Affects also tie together lived experiences with social and experienced spaces. The fashion show is an illustrative example of a powerful affective arena, but this also goes for the designer’s flagship store, the exhibition hall and the more hidden spaces of work.
We have for too long witnessed a discursive dominance in the social sciences. This dominance largely ignores what is felt and subjectively experienced in and through our bodies. Affects, rooted in intersubjective experience, might help us to better understand comings together and how these feed each other and circulate in the context of contemporary forms of precarious, global capitalism. ‘Social relations are immanently conditioned by actors’ affective states and associated identifications and dis-identifications – and thus attends to the mutually constitutive, and analytically revealing, relationship between affect and power in organizational practice’, Thompson and Willmott (2015, 2–3) write. The authors propose that an ‘affect-based ontology of practice’ holds radical implications for theoretical development. In this way, the study of affects might capture ordinary and intimate moments that say something very interesting about how the world ‘works’ (Berlant, 2011). In other words, affects might also help us to capture the relational dynamics of the ordinary, moving world that includes diverse embodied and emotional experiences, relations with others, movements, bodily skin-to-skin encounters, anxieties, ambiguities, touches and feelings, not to forget bodies capable of acting, affecting and being affected. Furthermore, we might want to consider moving away from arguably limiting, Cartesian modes of thinking that tend to separate the body from the mind, and build upon other dualisms in life. Perhaps we also should move towards more expressive, engaging and open-ended forms of knowing and expressing research. ‘Affect allows us to see, anew, the ‘texture’ of the world, as it is lived and experienced’, write Fotaki et al. in a call for papers in 2013, and I agree that this is why affects matter.
As my ambition is not to develop the notion of affect, here I will not problematize the ontology of affect further, or debate if affects are ‘autonomous’
(Massumi, 2002) or not. To be a bit more conceptually clear, however, it is helpful to position affects in relation to emotions and feelings. To me, affects and emotions are related but not interchangeable. Here, I distinguish between feelings, emotions and affects. Like Jokinen and Venäläinen (2015), I view feelings as individual bodily sensations that we usually recognize as emotions when they are culturally ‘labelled’ and articulated as such. Affects, felt intensities, highlight our interdependencies (Brennan, 2004; Linstead, 2015; Pullen and Rhodes, 2015) by making us sense and feel a variety of shared, powerful and intersubjective intensities that are experienced in and through the body. These cannot be ignored in the context of fashion. We can feel a pressing or competitive atmosphere as we enter an international fashion trade show, or feel the excitement in the air and in our stomach backstage at a fashion show. These intensities matter to us, and to the organizing of these particular contexts more broadly. These fleeting experiences might also be attached to objects and carefully manipulated for capitalist purposes (Thrift, 2008, 2010) − a regular phenomenon in the context of fashion (e.g. Moeran, 2015). Still, momentary and fleeting affects in-between bodies always appear ungraspable and ‘out of bounds’ to us in a multidimensional and moving reality, which is part of their fascination. Taken together, affect, as an informing, transpersonal energy or general capacity to inform (e.g. Clough, 2007; Spinoza, 1989), links to bodies, matter and economy. I also sympathize with feminist readings of affects (e.g. Pullen and Rhodes, 2015), especially as this diverse approach stresses the ‘bringing back’ of materiality, the body and the emotional to research. Also, a common assumption in the literature is that these dimensions are always already intensely intertwined.