702917

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JCS0010.1177/1468795X17702917Journal of Classical SociologyBarnwell

Article
Journal of Classical Sociology

Durkheim as affect theorist

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© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1468795X17702917
https://doi.org/10.1177/1468795X17702917
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Ashley Barnwell
The University of Melbourne, Australia

Abstract
While the sociology of emotions has a long history, theories of affect claim to pose new questions
about contagious currents of feeling. But the definition of affect as an autonomous force that is
precognitive, outside of semiotic systems, inaccessible to interpretation and measurement, and
resistant to structure and critique may present unnecessary limitations for social inquiry. The
division between affect and structure has left some sociologists, specifically in the sociology of
emotions and the body, unsure about how to use affect theory. My article suggests that the aims
of affect theory could be better served by a deeper engagement with, rather than a departure
from, the traditions and concerns of sociological thought. To explore this possibility, I revisit
Emile Durkheim’s efforts to understand the compelling power of social currents, which provide
a way to rethink the divisions between affect and structure and the idea of a ‘presocial’ that has
polarised scholars on the notion of affect.

Keywords
Affect theory, consciousness, Durkheim, emotion, posthumanism, social structure

Introduction
While the sociology of emotions has a long history, theories of affect claim to pose new
questions about contagious currents of feeling. The term affect is used to describe a pre-
conscious form of emotion that is registered in bodies and has political effects but is not
reducible to known feelings, such as envy or joy. However, the definition of affect as an
autonomous force that is precognitive, outside of semiotic systems, and resistant to struc-
ture and critique may present unnecessary limitations for social inquiry. Critics of the
‘affective turn’ have expressed concern over the general assumptions that ‘affect is
somehow outside the social’ and ‘always already transgressive’ (Gill and Pratt, 2008: 16,
see also Wetherell, 2012). Several high-profile assessments have focused on the cultural
theory of Brian Massumi (1995) specifically (Hemmings, 2006; Leys, 2011; Papoulias

Corresponding author:
Ashley Barnwell, School of Social and Political Sciences, The University of Melbourne, John Medley Building,
Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia.
Email: abarnwell@unimelb.edu.au
2 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0)

and Callard, 2010) which adjudicates between the precognitive, presocial realm of affec-
tive perception and the structural, social, linguistic order of cognition (p. 87). Massumi
(1995) argues that affect is dynamic and mutable, and ‘structure is the place where noth-
ing ever happens, that explanatory heaven in which all eventual permutations are prefig-
ured in a self-consistent set of invariant generative rules’ (p. 87). This division between
affect and structure in particular has left some sociologists, specifically in the sociology
of emotions and the body, unsure about how to use affect theory.
To address this tension, my article suggests that the aims of affect theory could be
better served by a deeper engagement with, rather than a departure from, the traditions
and concerns of sociological thought. The current ‘turn to affect’ is usually traced back
through Brian Massumi (1995), to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (1987) and Baruch
Spinoza (2001 [1677]), or via Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (Sedgwick and Frank, 1995) back
to Silvan Tomkins (2008 [1962]), and Melanie Klein (Sedgwick, 2007). One is a philo-
sophical genealogy; the other is a psychological one. Here, I wish to recover a sociologi-
cal lineage for affect theory via the work of Emile Durkheim, and in doing so, challenge
the tendency to orient it against existing concerns about social structure and critiques of
false consciousness. Durkheim is a foundational figure in the sociology of emotions
(Barbalet, 2001; Collins, 1990; Denzin, 1994; Fish, 2002; Bendelow and Williams,
1997), but has not been taken up in affect theory, despite the consonance of his theories
with notions of a decentred, pre-individual ‘posthuman’ agency (Wolfe, 2009), and
unconscious contagion between bodies.1 However, I argue that his work gives us a way
to rethink the division between structure and affect, a division that risks limiting the pos-
sibilities for thinking about affects as social and systemic, or as forces that can coagulate
and defer our attention as often as they liberate and resist.
This theoretical family tree also allows further scope to bridge research between the
sociology of emotions and affect theory and to recognise the value of classical sociologi-
cal theory for addressing very current questions about the human’s role in its wider ecol-
ogy. This approach joins with scholarship on Durkheim to forge new allegiances between
his scholarship and other schools of theory (Cladis, 1999; Fish, 2013; Misztal, 2003;
Ramp, 2008; Riley, 2002; Sawyer, 2002; Gangas 2007; Lefebvre and White, 2010) and
to challenge the notion that theoretical innovation is about succeeding and discarding
previous theories (Pickering 2002; Ritzer et al. 2001; Stedman Jones, 2001; Strenski
2006). Instead, it embraces the value of classical theories to address both enduring and
new social problems. In this vein, my line of inquiry is not a rebuttal of affect theory.
Reopening questions about the affective capacity of social structure offers an opportu-
nity to reconsider the parameters and precedents of affect theory, and thus how we under-
stand the social life of affect itself. Before exploring Durkheim as an affect theorist, I will
situate my reading of his work within current tensions in affect theory to provide an
orientation and comparative ground.

Affect and structure

Affect theory has become increasingly popular since the mid-1990s, sweeping the social
sciences and humanities. Like all intellectual groups or movements, the scholars cur-
rently working on affect are heterogeneous, yet subscribe to some common assumptions.
Barnwell 3

Addressing this commonality without obscuring the nuances and contexts of specific
arguments presents a challenge. It is important to note that not all affect theorists sub-
scribe to an affect/structure split. Works stemming from feminist studies in particular
(Ahmed, 2004; Berlant, 2011; Blackman, 2012; Brennan, 2003; Illouz, 2007; Riley,
2005) engage with the cultural, structuring and linguistic capacities of affect, as conta-
gious and volatile social currents. Addressing a specific approach to affect, my focus is
on the use of the term, which Perri 6 et al. (6, 2007) explain:

is now deployed in new materialist and anti-psychoanalytic theories of culture, that reject
theories of representation in favour of an approach to culture that foregrounds the impact of, for
instance, the fluctuations of sound and light that constitute film at the proto-subjective and
affective level.

(p. 6)

Or, the notion of affect that, as Rosalind Gill and Andy Pratt (2008) describe in their
work on affective labour, ‘is conjured as a pre-subjective intensity, which exists outside
signification’ (p. 16). To be precise, I am interested here in the influential rendering of
affect as opposed to social and semiotic structures of meaning that is most often ascribed
to Brian Massumi.
Massumi’s definition of affect is considered one of the most enduring and influential.
Charting the recent interest in this concept, Melissa Gregg and Gregory Seigworth (2010)
suggest that

undoubtedly the watershed moment for the most recent resurgence of interest and intrigue
regarding affect and theories of affect came in 1995 when two essays were published – one by
Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (‘Shame in the Cybernetic Fold’) and the other by Brian
Massumi (‘The Autonomy of Affect’).

(p. 5)

In these theories, affect is something that operates independently of or through the

human, rather than as a property of human personality. One important point of contention
within this field is whether affect and emotion are interchangeable. Sedgwick, following
Tomkins, discusses affect in terms of specific emotions such as shame (Sedgwick and
Frank, 1995). The main point for Sedgwick is that affect is triggered externally rather
than internally from trauma, in the psychoanalytic sense. Massumi, however, draws a
stricter division between affect and emotion.
In ‘The Autonomy of Affect’, Massumi (1995) states that ‘it is crucial to theorise the
difference between affect and emotion’ because they ‘follow different logics and pertain to
different orders’ (p. 88). He bases this division on the idea that emotions are cognitive
structures of language that distort affect after the initial event of corporeal perception
(Massumi, 1995). Eric Shouse (2005) explains that for Massumi, ‘affect is not a personal
feeling or emotion. Feelings are personal and biographical, emotions are social, and affects
are prepersonal’ (unpaginated). Massumi characterises emotion as affect that has been
‘pinned down’ and defined in words, rendered static by structure, and thus ineffective for
4 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0)

explaining a dynamic world (Massumi in Zournazi, 2002: 27). In this line of reasoning,
emotional recognition is understood as a sense-making mechanism that rationalises inde-
terminate affects into a periodic table of emotions, a codified, meaning-laden typography
of joy, embarrassment, sadness and so on. Massumi’s primary partition is therefore between
dynamic force and rigid structure.
The implication, and riddle, of Massumi’s affect theory is that the social sciences
must change their methods to register the virtual workings of affect. He argues that struc-
tural and semiotic approaches hamper our efforts to engage with affect: ‘there is no cul-
tural-theoretical vocabulary specific to affect. Our entire vocabulary has derived from
theories of signification that are still wedded to structure even across irreconciliable
differences’ (p. 88). This influential theorisation of affect, as presocial and autonomous
from structure, therefore presents a provocative set of questions for sociologists. For
example, if affect is something that happens outside the social realm, and cannot be
accessed by existing forms of critical or social enquiry, what can social scientists do with
affect? Is affect theory simply unreachable or out of bounds for those interested in the
sociological and structural determinants of social currents and their affects? While the
aim of affect theory is to open up the field of social inquiry to include the mercurial and
inchoate, this particular definition risks limiting the scope to consider the semiotic, struc-
tural and critical capacities of affective forces. This has been the key point of critique for
previous readings of Massumi’s theory.
Existing critiques (Hemmings, 2006; Leys, 2011 and Papoulias and Callard, 2010)
share two concerns. The first is about disciplinary value. Each critique takes issue with the
crude privileging of hard science over social science and the implied dismissal of key
sociological questions and methods as too out-dated for the study of affect. The second
concern is about the description of affect as ‘asocial’ and the questionable rigour with
which this definition is formulated. While these critiques can be read as challenges to the
empirical validity of affect theory, they are also protective responses to the representa-
tional implications of its impact. As Margaret Wetherell argues, the turn to affect some-
times puts unnecessary limitations in the way of its own aims. She explains that, for
example, the impasse posited between affect and discourse hampers research into the
‘emergent, open-ended, intertwined affective–discursive patterns evident in social life’
(Wetherell, 2013: 349). For Hemmings, these oversights preclude an open inquiry into
how affect works to produce and create a diverse range of social conditions. Hemmings
explains that ‘we are left with a riddle-like description of affect as something scientists
can detect the loss of (in the anomaly), social scientists and cultural critics cannot inter-
pret, but philosophers can imagine’ (p. 563). She asks, ‘How then can we engage affect in
light of the critical projects we are engaged in, or are we to abandon the social sciences
entirely?’ (p. 563). It is not, when you look more closely, the opening of affect studies that
invites criticism from other scholars but the closing of sociological and critical methods
and concerns – the negative undertow to what has proven a productive current.
To address this rift between affect and structure, I argue that it is also productive to turn
our gaze back towards the traditions of the social sciences, rather than only towards the
future of philosophy or neuroscience. The question of how our actions are willed by a
collective ground of affective currents lies at the very basis of sociological thought, with
the writings of Emile Durkheim, and what can be read as his structuring and social notion
Barnwell 5

of affect. In the following section, I want to put Durkheim in dialogue with contemporary
affect theory and show how his ideas anticipate and can inform some of the problems
within it. By electing Durkheim as an early affect theorist, I argue, we might begin to
relinquish facile divisions between affect and emotion, dynamism and structure, and bio-
logical and social levels of perception. This analysis also foregrounds Durkheim’s affect
theory for the sociology of emotions, where, Jonathan Turner and Jan Stets (2006) claim,
the unconscious workings of emotion remain under-analysed (p. 47). Nikolas Rose (2013)
describes the turn to affect as a project that claims ‘human beings are not individuated,
conscious, rational, but rather are enmeshed in sensations and contagions, shaped by
affective and non-cognitive force fields’ (p. 11). Durkheim’s work on social currents gives
us the best of this argument, a sociological challenge to the Enlightened, sovereign,
rational individual, without the division between questions of being and knowing.

Durkheim’s affect theory

My intention is not to provide a close analysis of Durkheim’s texts, as the scope does not
allow it. Rather, I will show consonances with contemporary affect theory across several
texts in a way that opens up multiple paths into Durkheim’s writings, helps to direct
future research and confirms that his interest in affect is not an aberrant digression.
Opportunities for dialogue arise in several key texts, including The Division of Labour in
Society (Durkheim, 1984 [1893]), The Rules of Sociological Method (Durkheim, 1964
[1895]), Suicide (Durkheim, 1975 [1897]), Primitive Classification (Durkheim and
Mauss, 2007 [1903]) and The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (Durkheim, 1995
[1912]). Woven across these texts is Durkheim’s fascination with the riddle of how a
contagious effervescence – an affective life force – energises and structures social atmos-
pheres, conditions and collective consciousness. With his genuinely curious frame,
Durkheim presents opportunities to reconfigure some of the stark divisions that trouble
affect theory, such as those between social/presocial, emotion/affect, moral/material and
corporeal/cognitive.
When you read passages from Durkheim’s (1964 [1895]) ‘What Is a Social Fact?’,
you can see the resonances with contemporary affect, and more generally, posthuman
theories. In his discussions of ‘collective emotion’ or ‘common feeling’, Durkheim
attempts to understand this compelling force that is at once felt from inside and outside
of us. It is not a psychoanalytic emotion, but it is not an asocial one either. For Durkheim,
emotional currents do not originate, in a straightforward way, from any one human con-
sciousness (p. 1). They are, in this sense, preindividual, but importantly not presocial. He
theorises that a dynamic form of structure, a ‘social current’, affects and is affected by
the historical, geographical, cultural, and economic specificities of a group:

These are what are called social ‘currents’. Thus in a public gathering the great waves of
enthusiasm, indignation and pity that are produced have their seat in no one individual
consciousness. They come to each one of us from outside and can sweep us along in spite of
ourselves.

(Durkheim, 1964 [1895]: 4)

6 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0)

Similarly in Primitive Classification, Durkheim and his nephew Marcel Mauss (2007
[1903]) describe emotion as something similar to Massumi’s affect, but far less fixed.
For Durkheim, emotion can operate in the dynamic, shape-shifting way that affects
apparently work in opposition to emotions. Thus for him, the distinction between emo-
tion and affect – a distinction that sets up a rift between the sociology of emotion and
affect theory – is not germane. Akin to Massumi, Durkheim and Mauss argue that emo-
tion resists classification, though for different reasons. The likeness of their definition of
emotion to Massumi’s affect is obvious. However, in this formulation, affect resists
definitive representation not because it is presocial but because it is so socially complex.
Durkheim and Mauss (2007 [1903]) explain that

Emotion is something essentially fluid and inconsistent. Its contagious influence spreads far
beyond its point of origin, extending to everything about it, so that it is not possible to say …
where [states of an emotional nature] begin or where they end; they lose themselves in each
other, and mingle their properties in such a way that they cannot be rigorously categorised.

(p. 51)

This definition of emotion is more akin to the French etymology of the word émotion,
which means ‘to stir up’ or ‘agitate’, and the Latin emovere, which means ‘to move out’.
The nature of emotion here is not the static other of a dynamic emotion. In this descrip-
tion, affect is not a force that shifts and mutates beyond the static and enclosed social,
rather the social itself is made up of surging affects that render life uncertain and con-
stantly in flux. Let us track through Durkheim and Mauss’ description of emotion and
classification to draw out this distinction.
Like Massumi, Durkheim and Mauss argue that ‘emotion is naturally refractory to
analysis, or at least lends itself uneasily to it, because it is too complex. Above all when
it has a collective origin it defies critical and rational examination’ (p. 51). However, for
Durkheim and Mauss, emotion, here indeterminate, defies rationalisation and critical
analysis precisely because it has collective origins. It is innately social. Socialisation is
not equated with the moment of cognition or structural determinacy; rather, the social is
always present despite the individual’s level of consciousness or control. There is no
precise moment where one enters the realm of the symbolic, bestowing on events a fixed
social meaning. Durkheim and Mauss’ sense of how structure works is less linear and
rote. Instead, the social force of affect determines consciousness, or limits individual
attention for the benefit of the group, in a fluid and ongoing fashion.
What is read as a precognitive field of asocial intensity in affect theory is, for these
sociologists, already a field of social articulation. ‘The pressure exerted by the group on
each of its members’, Durkheim and Mauss argue, ‘does not permit individuals to judge
freely the notions which society itself has elaborated and in which it has placed some-
thing of its personality’ (p. 51). They argue that the act of classification becomes more
individuated though Modernity, but not exclusively so (p. 51). For them, the whole pro-
cess of classifying, of structuration, is still affectively and socially driven. Massumi ech-
oes the foundations of Durkheim and Mauss, in that he is trying to foreground the
articulating power of affect and decentre the self-determining subject as the origin of
Barnwell 7

emotion. However, as we can see from the older formulation, contemporary affect theory
introduces divisions where such processes operated in a more nebulous and complex
fashion in the structural affect theory of Durkheim and Mauss.
Neither does Durkheim sever the corporeal from the cognitive or the human from the
non-human; the entire ecology of socio-historical life constitutes our state of being. In
his affect theory, the social is not a construction that starts from biology as a given.
Rather, the social refines our biology, and biological response feeds back into the culture
of the whole. Our very nervous systems are reordered by the clang and reeling progress
of industrialising cities. Durkheim (1975 [1897]) gestures to this in Suicide, in a passage
that is a forward-thinking challenge to the nature/culture divide, a divide that still struc-
tures some of the most cutting-edge social theories:

If we suppose, however, […] that a collective tendency cannot impose itself by brute force on
individuals with no preliminary predisposition, then this harmony must be automatically
achieved; for the causes determining the social currents affect individuals simultaneously and
predispose them to receive the collective influence. […] The hypercivilization which breeds the
anomic tendency and the egoistic tendency also refines nervous systems, making them
excessively delicate […]. In short, just as society largely forms the individual, it forms him to
the same extent in its own image. Society, therefore, cannot lack the material for its needs, for
it has, so to speak, kneaded it with its own hand.

(p. 323)

For Durkheim, the affective force that compels people to act, the social current that
lifts them up, not only refines their choices but also their biologies. Perception is not
presocial. Our very corporeal state, the order of our perception, is socially contingent.
For Massumi, perception operates prior to the didacticism of social meanings. Meanings
come in the process of sense making, when we render affects into what are taken to be a
limited set of predetermined emotions. But for Durkheim, no such divide between nature
and culture exists. Durkheim does not presume that he is dealing with two different
orders, the structural and the affective, the moral and the material, one inaccessible to the
other. For him, the structure is not static. It is volatile and processual. As Francesco
Callegaro (2016) notes, Durkheim is interested in how the very idea of a sovereign ‘per-
son’ with their own cognitive system was created and ‘added to existing natural and
social reality’ (p. 40). Likewise, William Ramp suggests that Durkheim questions how
we construct boundaries between the knowable and the unknowable or the representable
and the ineffable that then constitute our fields of vision and knowledge. Ramp explains,
‘The un-representability of the social totality – the “all that is” which is both beyond us
and constitutive of us – is, paradoxically, precisely that which is represented in the in-
approachability of the sacred’ (p. 210). Rather than accepting the bounds of our percep-
tion as given, Durkheim tracks how our nervous systems, our forms of perception, are
refined by social currents – dynamic structures – often without our recognition.
Critics of this attempt to elect Durkheim as an affect theorist might argue that he is a
constructivist, and therefore not in consonance with the monist, materialist and all-inclu-
sive aims of affect theory. But such criticisms would have to think more openly about
8 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0)

Durkheim’s understanding of social construction, or creation. For Durkheim, it is not

simply that there is a natural, biological ground, and then society is constructed upon that
ground, or even that some things are socially constructed and not others. His theory is
quite ecological in the sense that he sees biology as a dynamic matter, which along with
less obvious matter, such as emotion or morality, is refined and reproduced by the social
environment, making the nervous system more or less sensitive to certain stimuli. In a
special issue of Social Psychology Quarterly on Sentiments, Affect and Emotion, prior
to the resurgence of affect theory, Gene Fisher and Kyum Koo Chon (1989) look closely
at Durkheim’s work on religion and suicide and foreground the fact that, for him, emo-
tions are corporeal (though not hard-wired) as well as constructivist, that is, the body
vitally participates in the creative and cohesive process of collective effervescence.
Similarly, Durkheimian work on transient emotions, emotional contagion and emotional
energy works with a physiological, yet dynamic and social, notion of transmission and
embodiment (Collins, 1990; Hatfield et al., 1994; Summers-Effler, 2002).
In The Division of Labour in Society, Durkheim presents a distinctly biological under-
standing of the social body. He speaks of the social organism as a material body, with its
structure and laws – its division of labour – all vital, circulating and symbiotic parts of
its system (Levine, 1995). The law, he argues, operates like the social nervous system,
and ‘has its task in the regulation of the different functions of the body in such a way as
to make them harmonise’ (Levine, 1995: 128). Durkheim thinks of the workings of the
social body as both conscious and unconscious processes. Its digestion, circulation and
other autonomic processes go on unconsciously but nevertheless motor its very life and
absorb and affect the wider ecology of the body and its environs (pp. 360–361). Read for
this current of thought, not only is Durkheim material in his treatment of the social, but
he also includes social structures in the dynamic materiality of life.
Further work could also be done to orient Durkheim not as an alternative to Deleuzian
notions of affect, but in kinship with them, via his shared immersion and indebtedness to
the philosophy of Spinoza (Breiger, 2011). Within Durkheim’s theory of affective influ-
ence, we can hear the influence of Spinoza’s famous dictum ‘to affect and be affected’.
For Durkheim (1995 [1912]), this implies a specifically relational form of affect theory,
where the social body is connected and its collective sentiments are transmitted between
and felt within people:

There is virtually no instance of our lives in which a certain rush of energy fails to come to us
from outside ourselves. In all kinds of acts that express the understanding, esteem, and affection
of our neighbour, there is a life that the man who does his duty feels, usually without being
aware of it.

(p. 213)

It is possible to read Durkheim as human-centred in his theory of how affect circu-

lates, both relationally and biologically. His notion of sui generis, for example, is some-
times seen to draw hierarchical distinctions between the complexity of human and other
life forms (Lefebvre and White 2010: 462). However, in The Elementary Forms of
Religious Life (Durkheim, 1995 [1912]), sacred things and animal totems are vital actors
Barnwell 9

in the mediation and constitution of collective effervescence, and thus social structure
and solidarity. The event of the ritual that Durkheim chooses to explain emotional struc-
ture requires the participation of an ecology of persons, things, elements, specific envi-
ronmental features and animals within a complex totemic system that ensures the
sustainability of all life forms. The sociality of humans is of prime interest to Durkheim,
but a rereading of the scene could draw out the agency of other participants. His theory
could therefore be reread in light of the ecological and materialist concerns of more
recent ‘emergent’ theories (Sawyer, 2002; Stedman Jones, 1996).
Indeed, in this text, Durkheim specifically argues against the notion that human soci-
ety is somehow separate from nature. He says that to ‘interpret a sociological theory of
knowledge in that way is to forget that even if society is a specific reality … it is part of
nature’ (p. 17). With regard to relational forms of social organisation, Durkheim argues
that ‘society makes them more manifest but has no monopoly on them’ (p. 17).
Challenging readings of his work as a kind of subjectivist constructivism, Durkheim
adds that ‘the social elements of ideas of time, space, genus, cause and personality’ does
not prevent them from being concurrently objective (p. 18). ‘Quite the contrary’, he
states, ‘their social origin leads one to indeed suppose that they are not without founda-
tion in the nature of things’ (p. 18). Durkheim is therefore attuned to the ethical and
practical question of what we include and exclude when we demarcate what registers
within the social or sentient fields of our attention. These important qualifications within
his scope allow for extension of his concepts to less human centred readings of the emo-
tional grounds for social reproduction and/or becoming.

The social ethics of cognition

Massumi argues that affect is immune to critique because it simply does not respond to
being pinned down, examined or recognised. But if we follow Durkheim, we might con-
sider that what we do and do not perceive is itself determined by our sociological and
political context. We participate in a social consciousness that limits or restructures what
we take to be our individual perception. The cognitive process of the individual is already
part of a social system rather than the point at which the social coding of affect begins.
For Durkheim ideas or feelings are ‘socio-ecologically determined’ (Némedi, 2000: 85).
Affect, in this context, would not be naturally imperceptible, but rather might be ren-
dered imperceptible by certain social forces. In this line of thinking, the gaps in our
vision or an aspect of our blindness to certain stimuli may be social denial: we are famil-
iar with the almost instinctual prickling feeling when we are reminded of our complicity
in oppressive systems, such as sweatshop labour or climate change, as well as how
quickly this concern usually dissipates as we get on with the day. Given this, the question
of consciousness that is vital to theories of affect may be more complex than can be
adequately explained by a process of presocial perception which arrives at a point of
socially ordering cognition only when it is registered within the nervous system of spe-
cific individuals. This is where Durkheim’s notion of social cognition becomes espe-
cially helpful for thinking about the social operation of affect as well as how we perceive
it. In this, his classical work supports contemporary theoretical approaches to ecology,
ontology and material intelligence.
10 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0)

Durkheim argued that focusing only on the individual, their experience and interpre-
tation of cause and event, results in a limitation of knowledge about how events gain
momentum and expression. He examined the problem of suicide sociologically, beyond
the level of the individual, to understand the social will, current, or atmosphere that
refines a person’s perception of the choices available to them. His notion draws attention
to the varying levels of consciousness that we participate in as social beings and our
susceptibility to contingent social atmospheres that direct, in many ways, our embodied
emotional lives. In this, we can see that the contemporary definition of affect, as a force
that pulls our attention and perception, sometimes in spite of ourselves, resonates with
early sociological accounts of collective agency. In this kinship, I argue, we can retain
the interesting questions of perception and volition that are summoned by Massumi’s
discussion of affect but without the implication that affect’s resistance is fixed, essential
and kept strangely aloft from social reproduction and its critique.
This sociological definition of affect also raises slightly different questions about the
implications of affect for representation and method. Massumi calls for new modes of
attention that are less scrutinous, revelatory and critical, but a more mercurial, nebulous
affect might actually call for closer critical attention to questions of causality and respon-
sibility. Just because we feel that we cannot know or articulate something does not mean
that this thing is in itself outside the realms of the semiotic or the structural. Indeed, the
nature of affect, as social architecture, may be to redirect our attention elsewhere. In an
ethical argument, it is therefore vital that the line of the social not be drawn between the
perceptible and the imperceptible because the very question of what we can and cannot
see is itself a question of social ethics. As C. Wright Mills (1959) explains, the individual
often feels that their problems are personal troubles because they do not have the scope
to see that their ‘troubles’ are symptomatic of larger social issues (p. 3). This insular
perspective hides both the true social cause and possible solutions to social problems.
It is for this reason that to the sociological ear, and perhaps even to the broadly critical
one, to conclude that we simply cannot know or represent affect sounds problematic.
While it is beyond the scope of the article to thoroughly orient Durkheim’s questions
within current concerns about the role of human consciousness in wider environmental
ecologies, I will conclude the article with a brief explanation of how Durkheim’s socio-
logical notion of affect could be used to emphasise the social gravity and structuring
capacities of affect within arguments associated with the ontological and ecological
‘turns’ in current social theory. Demonstrating Durkheim’s relevance to this emerging
field opens new avenues for pairing and integrating classical and contemporary theoreti-
cal approaches to the emotional and affective dimensions of social life.

Sociology and ecology: Future directions for Durkheim’s

affect theory
Durkheim’s interest in how social and political currents revise our perceptual systems
and social priorities is important for addressing current questions about environmental
recognition and responsibility. In his book, Slow Violence and The Environmentalism of
the Poor (2011), Rob Nixon, like Durkheim in Suicide, calls for scholars to reorient their
Barnwell 11

attention to a scale far beyond the singular event. Nixon (2011) argues that while recent
theory has devoted much attention to the ‘event’ and the ‘crisis’ as objects of analysis, an
‘incremental and accretive’ form of violence ‘that occurs gradually and out of sight’ has
been overlooked (p. 2). Nixon opens his book with a quotation from Arundahti Roy that
places his intervention within the context of social perception. In this quotation, Roy
explains that social processes have the capacity to structure what we can and cannot
perceive:

I think of globalization like a light which shines brighter and brighter on a few people and the
rest are in darkness, wiped out. They simply can’t be seen. Once you get used to not seeing
something, then, slowly, it’s no longer possible to see it.

(Roy in Nixon, 2011: 1)

Durkheim’s theories of social transformation and its impact on social solidarity give us a
way to historically contextualise and approach these challenges. Indeed, Durkheim’s
continuity with the new, very popular arguments of Nixon, position his theory of affect
as a sociological legacy and point of entry to current social inquiries about ecology and
the ethics of representation.
A century earlier, Durkheim spoke of the way life in industrialising mass societies, or
‘hypercivilization’, refined nervous systems, sensitising or desensitising people differ-
ently to those who lived in previous conditions. For Nixon, contemporary issues of envi-
ronmental degradation call forth similar questions about the politics of perception. In
contrast to Massumi, Nixon sees the threshold of perception as something that can be
determined by social agendas, such as neo-liberalism, rather than something that marks
a transition between presocial and social realms. Nixon acknowledges that ‘slow vio-
lence’, the violence of environmental degradation, presents representational challenges,
but for him they are challenges that we must address rather than accept as natural or
essential limitations. Nixon (2011) explains,

We need, I believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular
nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing
out across a range of temporal scales. In so doing, we also need to engage the representational,
narrative, and strategic challenges posed by the relative invisibility of slow violence.

(p. 3)

Crucially, what Nixon offers is something quite different from Massumi’s (in Zournazi,
2002) suggestion that ‘What [emotions] lose, precisely, is the expression event – in favour
of structure’ (p. 27). For Nixon, the idea that we cannot readily perceive certain social
processes is not about rote cognition, but how cognition and traditions of representation,
including the primacy of ‘the event’, are complicit in the directives of particular social,
economic and ideological wills. Nixon does not wish to accept that certain social agencies
simply fall beneath the threshold of our perception and therefore escape representation as
a natural fact. For him this ‘escaping’ is a topic for ethical and political inquiry and an
12 Journal of Classical Sociology 00(0)

important representational challenge for social scientists, a point that chimes with
Durkheim’s work on choice in Suicide, or even Simmel’s (1971 [1903]) work on the blasé
attitude in ‘The Metropolis and Mental Life’. In Durkheim’s theory of affect, the crisis
operates not just at the level of the individual’s corporeal cognition but also at the social
level that constitutes this very cognitive process. The fact that we cannot register affect
may be because it is not in the interest of the system, and thus own participation, to do so.
Therefore, as Durkheim and Nixon argue, the challenge for social scientists is to find a
suitable scope, be it of scale or temporality, with which to register and interrogate, rather
than simply accept, the affective processes and effects which we cannot see. By including
Durkheim’s question of how our perception is directed by social currents, a question that
has been revived by Nixon, affect theory opens up to sociological inquiries about the role
of affect in reproducing and revealing social inequalities and political blind-spots.
Therefore, while particular expressions of affect theory have been critiqued for
excluding sociological questions about how meaning and structure are reproduced, in
taking up Durkheim’s theory, there is room to rethink just what affective force is and how
it works. The aim of affect theory is to get closer to the nebulous currents that animate
everyday life. Certainly in Massumi’s work, there is a desire to improve contemporary
political conditions, or at least our understanding of them. If this is the aim, then surely
all the possible conditions of creation and agency – including questions of intention and
causality – must remain part of our investigation into how social currents and actions
form, mutate and animate? If, following Durkheim, we open affect’s identity up to
include the structural as dynamic and affective, we can extend the potential of the affec-
tive turn’s intended project.
Similarly, we need not divorce from preceding scholarship – to revolutionise and start
a new slate – if we can return to existing lines of thought to explore how social collec-
tives or ecologies create and are created. As I have shown, foundational sociological
theories can be reread and mobilised, rather than set aside and apparently superseded, to
advance arguments that are attuned to the entanglement of social construction and mate-
riality. Durkheim presents opportunities to reconfigure some of the stark divisions that
trouble affect theory, such as those between social/presocial, emotion/affect, moral/
material and corporeal/cognitive. Bringing this genealogy into conversations about affect
also gives sociologists a stake in exploring the relationship between affective perception
and social consciousness. While some may argue that dividing affect from emotion can
be analytically useful and productive, it is also important to recognise that such structural
divisions can result in collapsing or obscuring complexities that have been drawn out in
previous studies, albeit under different terms. For example, Durkheim may refer to emo-
tion, but when we read his descriptions of how emotions work, they clearly have the
same processual, dynamic and, even, at times, mysterious, force that contemporary
notions of affect describe. This also means research from the sociology of emotions that
works with Durkheimian ideas, or derivations, may also be relevant to discussions of
affect theory, and valuable for developing a nuanced sociological understanding of
affects, in their origins, embodiments, and impacts. Theorised within this genuinely
inclusive frame, affect could be nebulous and indeterminate, but it could also be histori-
cal, or linguistic, or profoundly didactic; coercing the civic into certain shapes. Social
Barnwell 13

scientists could find aspects to both celebrate and critique in an affect that might be
dually conducive and circumspect.

Note
1. Although it is beyond my scope to detail the debate (Candea, 2010), this might in part
be explained by Bruno Latour’s influential championing of Gabriel Tarde – with his
focus on networks and the transmission of feeling – as a more appropriate father figure
for sociology (Latour, 2005: 13–16; Latour and Lepinay, 2005). However, I argue that
we can read Durkheim as an affect theorist and as a classical scholar who holds contem-
porary resonance for ‘critical thinking across the humanities, that places the reinvention
and re-figuring of bodies, corporeality, matter, affect and even life, as central concerns’
(Blackman, 2008: 29). It is precisely Durkheim’s focus on the social yet preindividual
force of emotional currents (the point where he differs from Tarde) that makes his think-
ing useful for addressing the tension surrounding ‘autonomous’ or ‘asocial’ definitions of
affect.

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Author biography
Ashley Barnwell is the Ashworth Lecturer in Sociology in the School of Social and Political
Sciences at the University of Melbourne. Her research is based on cultural sociology and social
theory and focuses on the politics of truth-telling and sharing stories in public life. Her work is
published in journals such as Cultural Sociology, Cultural Studies, Continuum: Journal of Media
and Cultural Studies and Emotion, Space and Society. She is currently writing a book about the
turn to affect and ontology and its implications for critical sociology.