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Emotions, affects and the production of social life

Article  in  British Journal of Sociology · March 2015

DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12119

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 Emotions, affects and the production of social life

Nick J Fox

University of Sheffield

Accepted for publication in British Journal of Sociology

Published online 18 March 2015

DOI: 10.1111/1468-4446.12119

Web: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1468-4446.12119/abstract

Please note this is the submitted version of the paper, before peer review. You may not
quote this paper without express permission from myself. If you wish to refer to it or
cite it, please contact me and I will send you the published version.

Address for correspondence:

Professor N Fox, ScHARR, University of Sheffield, Regent St, Sheffield S1 4DA, UK

n.j.fox@sheffield.ac.uk
Abstract

While emotions are implicated in many aspects of social life, a sociological perspective
should foreground the part they play in producing the social world and human history. This
paper turns away from individualistic and anthropocentric emphases on the experience of
feelings and emotions, attending instead to an exploration of flows of ‘affect’ (meaning
simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between bodies, things, social institutions and
abstractions. The paper establishes an anti-humanist sociology of affects that acknowledges
emotions as a part, but only a part, of a more generalised affective flow that produces bodies
and the social world. Within this affective sociology, emotions are not a peculiarly
remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a continuum of
affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment. Romantic love
illustrates this perspective, showing how apparently personal and private, embodied feelings
can link to broader aspects of social organisation. The paper concludes by re-assessing the
part that emotions play in producing capacities to feel and to act, in a wide range of areas of
interest to sociology.

Key Words: emotions; affect; anti-humanism; assemblage; Deleuze; social production

The intention of this paper is to supply some theoretical and empirical tools to enhance the
sociological study of the contribution of emotions to social life and human history. The
significance of emotions to social order and disorder was recognised by Durkheim and Weber
(Barbelet 2001: 10, Fish 2005; Shilling 2002), neglected in rationalist sociologies and social
policy (Jasper 1998: 397-8; Tamboukou 2003: 210), and re-discovered more recently in
sociology’s ‘affective turn’ (Blackman and Venn 2010; Clough 2008; Jasper 2011).
Alongside reasoned choices and decisions, what humans feel has a part to play in producing
the world, from the progression of a conversation to the shaping of global politics and
economics (Jaggar 1992: 153; Jasper 2011: 286; Summers-Effler 2002; Thrift 2004: 57). As
Jasper (1998: 398) has argued

Emotions pervade all social life, social movements included. The most prosaic daily
routines, seemingly neutral, can provoke violent emotional responses when interrupted.
... Not only are emotions part of our responses to events, but they also – in the form of
deep affective attachments - shape the goals of our actions.

Sociology has located emotions in the interplay between social environment, mind and body
(Hochschild 1983: 220; Turner 2001), with various accounts of the relative import of these
dimensions (Belli et al. 2010). However, I shall argue that sociological conceptions of
‘agency’ and ‘structure’ make it hard to navigate between the hazards of a romanticised
notion of an emotionally-repressed or managed human actor, and a view of emotions as
constituted overwhelmingly by social forces and largely independent of embodiment. I
follow those who have criticised a sociological view of emotions as individualistic, atavistic,
‘interior’ responses (Ahmed 2004: 8; Navaro-Yashin 2009: 12; Thrift 2004: 60), but also
those who attack an over-socialised, disembodied emotion (Sabini and Silver 1998).

Instead, the paper advances an approach that locates emotions as a sub-component of a

broader interactivity between bodies, other entities and the social that produces unfolding
lives, societies and history, and suggests that we look not at what emotions are, but what they
do (Ahmed 2004: 4). I set out to shift sociological focus away from physiological and
individually-experienced feelings, to a fundamentally sociological (and research-amenable)
exploration of flows of ‘affect’ (meaning simply a capacity to affect or be affected) between
bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions. Within this sociology, ‘emotions’ are not
a peculiarly remarkable outcome of the confluence of biology and culture, but part of a
continuum of affectivity that links human bodies to their physical and social environment
(Tamboukou 2003: 211; Youdell and Armstrong 2011: 145).

Sociology, emotions and the ‘affective turn’

Conventional sociological wisdom suggests that emotions are embodied responses to

environmental/social cues (for instance, an event, an interaction or a person), mediated by
cognitive processes that provide meaning or value to those cues (Barbalet 2002: 3; Freund
1990; Hochschild 1983: 220; Jaggar 1992: 153; Williams and Bendelow 1998a: 137).
However, the challenge for sociology has been to offer a perspective that satisfactorily
addresses both physiological and social aspects of emotion (Williams and Bendelow 1996:
34). One solution (usually labelled as social constructionist) has been to explore empirically
the social organisation, manifestation and management of emotions and emotionality,
downplaying the physiology of the response itself. According to this perspective, while
emotions

are accompanied by physical changes, their existence is not explained in terms of these
physiological correlates. ... Emotions vary culturally and socially in their subjective
meaning and expression. They are (perhaps with the exception of so-called primary
emotions like anger or fear) social and cultural constructions. Sociology, many
constructionists argue, should not focus on ‘physiological details’ until the varieties of
emotions, their functions, and relationships to the moral order and other aspects of
emotional life have been thoroughly studied. ... Instead, the focus should be on
discourses about emotions and how various emotion vocabularies are used (Freund
1990: 453).

From a constructionist view, emotions are bodily experiences whose expression cannot be
separated from socio-cultural contexts (Belli et al. 2010: 261) and socialisation (Turner and
Stets 2005: 2-3). For example, emotional differences between men and women reflect
different socialisation (Duncombe and Marsden 1993), perpetuating dominant values and
social forms, including class, ethnic and gender stratifications (Jaggar 1992: 159-160).
Emotions may be manipulated for social goals, for instance in social movements (Bensimon
2012; Jasper 1998) or the workplace (Lee-Treweek 1996; Niven et al 2009). Some emotions
have ceased to be recognised as experiential states altogether (Belli et al. 2010: 261-2), while
developing ‘new’ emotions might be a means to subvert the social order (Jaggar 1992: 161-
2).

Social constructionist perspectives have been interrogated over their capacity to fully capture
the experience of immediate or ‘primary’ emotions (for instance anger or fear) that are more
firmly tied to bodily states (Jasper 1998: 400), and may resist social judgement (Sabini and
Silver 1998). A second perspective upon the sociology of emotions has been informed by
approaches including phenomenology, existentialism and interactionism, and by a growth of
sociological interest in embodiment (Freund 1990; Williams and Bendelow 1996). This
thread sought to make sense of why and how certain environmental or social circumstances
lead to emotional responses. Advocates focused their data upon ‘a conception of the human
body as a lived structure of ongoing experience’ (Williams and Bendelow 1998a: 137), and a
humanistic phenomenology with an ‘actively feeling, embodied person as its control focus’
(Freund 1990: 470).

These theorists have often drawn (explicitly or implicitly) upon individualistic approaches in
biology, psychology, psychoanalysis and phenomenology, including cognitive, evolutionary
and biopsychosocial theory to substantiate their models (Berezin 2002: 37; Carter 2003;
Freund 1990: 454; Williams and Bendelow 1996: 30). Some have gone further, to integrate
biological and biopsychosocial elements into their theories of emotions (Bendelow 2009;
James and Gabe 1996: 8). For Turner and Stets (2005: 9), emotions involve biological
activation of key body systems, facial, vocal and paralinguistic expression of emotions,
culturally-applied linguistic labels to different emotions, perceptions and appraisals of objects
or events, and socially constructed constraints on which emotions are experienced or
expressed. In such accounts, biology, psychology and social context are inextricably
intertwined, not least by an assumption that emotionality has some benefit for individuals or
for the human species, for instance, to create social solidarity, signal danger, or protect
individuals or groups against threats (Hochschild 1983: 220; Lyon 1996: 69-70; Massey
2002; Williams and Bendelow 1998b: 138). Most models assert that a discrepancy or
dissonance between ‘what we see and what we expect to see’ (Hoschchild 1983: 221; Turner
2001: 134) produces corporeal or cognitive discomfort (or feelings of pleasure where there is
congruity), or indicate that the body is suffering distress (Bendelow 2009), powerlessness
(Freund 1990: 466) or a negative image of how the self is perceived by others (Goffman
1969: 246; Scheff 2005: 147).

In parallel with these sociological debates over emotions, it has been suggested (Clough
2008; Leys 2011; Papoulias and Callard 2010) that more generally within the humanities,
cultural theory and certain social sciences, the past couple of decades have been marked by
an ‘affective turn’ which has challenged structuralist and post-structuralist trends that had
elevated language and social structure over biology (Papoulias and Callard 2010: 30-31), and
re-discovered ‘a common ontology linking the social and the natural, the mind and body, the
cognitive and affective’ (Blackman and Venn 2010: 7). Leys (2011: 436) argues that this
move is motivated by concerns to overcome the limitations of an over-rationalised
understanding of human action.

The claim is that we human beings are corporeal creatures imbued with subliminal
affective intensities and resonances that so decisively influence or condition our
political and other beliefs that we ignore those affective intensities and resonances at
our peril -- not only because doing so leads us to underestimate the political harm that
the deliberate manipulation of our affective lives can do but also because we will
otherwise miss the potential for ethical creativity and transformation that ‘technologies
of the self” designed to work on our embodied being can help bring about.

While writers in this tendency diverge widely in their approaches to affect, the common
thread has been to assert a need to attend more to the non-rational, embodied and emotional
components of human life, and to explore the extent to which these affective elements
contribute to the production of society and culture. Thus, for example, Thrift (2004: 74)
advocates an ‘affective politics’ that exploits humans’ pre-rational, emotional reactions to
inter alia improve judgement, enhance pleasure, and increase possibilities for action.
Youdell and Armstrong (2011) describe school life as an ‘affective choreography’ of bodies,
pleasures and emotions within collectivities; while Henriques (2010) discloses the
propagation of affect through the physical, sociological and emotional vibrations, repetitions
and rhythms of the collective and embodied activities of Jamaican night-life.

Despite the emergence of this affective turn, its value and rationale have been contested, with
on one hand Massumi (1996: 221) seeing affect as ‘central to our understanding of our
information and image-based late capitalist culture’, and Clough (2008: 1) praising its
recognition of the ‘dynamism immanent to bodily matter and matter generally’. By contrast,
Leys (2011: 443) has criticised its ‘anti-intentionalism’ -- in which emotions are considered
prior to meanings, reasons, and beliefs -- as based on a mix of contested psychological and
neuroscientific research (ibid: 439) and ideological reactions against socialised and/or
rationalist theories of action (ibid: 443; for a different perspective on this move, see Thrift,
2004: 59ff.).

Unsettling emotions: beyond agency/structure

While sociology’s disciplinary focus on the social has enabled it to stand back from such
ontological debates over reason and emotion, the divergent emphases in social constructionist
and interactionist accounts of emotions replicate sociological debates over the relative
contributions to social life of structures and human agency. The former approaches
emphasise the part social constructs and judgements play in the deployment and management
of emotions, and downgrade the biological basis of emotions; the latter see emotions as a
‘missing link’ (Williams and Bendelow, 1998a: 137) between the social environment and
human biology.

There are, however, underpinning similarities between these sociological perspectives on

emotions. Both Navaro-Yashin (2009: 9) and Tamboukou (2003: 211) identify an
anthropocentrism that tie conceptions of emotions to the human body and human subject.
Thus, for example, emotions are a ‘bodily experience’ (Belli et al 2010: 261) and ‘the most
personal realms of an individual's experiences’ (Freund 1990: 453). As Ahmed (2004: 8-10)
puts it, emotions are conceived in these individualistic approaches either as something
escaping from the interior of a body, or the product of exterior forces seeping in. Tamboukou
(2003: 211) draws on Foucault’s anti-humanism to analyse emotions differently: as concepts
‘historically and culturally constituted in the process of the emergence of “the man” as the
object of psycho-scientific discourses’.

With these latter critiques in mind, I wish to question both the notion of emotions as bodily
phenomena, and their supposed ‘uniqueness’ as a link between body and society. Ahmed
(2004: 4) has suggested that we look not at what emotions are, but what they do,1 and this
proposition offers an approach that is both sociological and capable of empirical study
without recourse to individualised psychological, neuroscientific or physiological data. The
consequence of this move is to locate emotions -- regardless of their biological or social roots
-- as a component of the interactivity (which also includes physical and interpretive registers)
that links human bodies and other entities to their physical and social environment
(Tamboukou 2003: 211; Youdell and Armstrong 2011: 145); an interactivity that produces
unfolding lives, societies and history. This move shifts focus away from physiological and
individually-experienced feelings, to a fundamentally sociological (and research-amenable)
exploration of how assemblages of bodies, things, social institutions and abstractions affect or
are affected, and the part played by emotion in this ‘affective flow’.

If anthropocentric perspectives in the sociology of emotions have been predicated upon the
centrality of human action, an anti-anthropocentric or anti-humanist ontology that steps back
from a conventional agency/structure distinction may supply traction for developing a
sociology of affective production. Arguably the most influential theorist of affect (Clough
2008: 1; Leys 2011: 441 n. 20), Gilles Deleuze elaborated an anti-humanist ontology of affect
(used here simply to describe the capacity to affect or be affected rather than as a synonym
for emotion) based on his reading of Spinoza’s Ethics (Deleuze 1988, 1990). In this
perspective, all social production (of bodies, subjectivities, thoughts, social forms and
institutions, and political and economic orders) emerged from the myriad physical,
psychological, social, cultural and philosophical affective interactions between entities
(Deleuze 1988: 127-128; Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 149-51), and from the capacities and
desires deriving from these relationships (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 1–8). Bearing in mind
Leys’ (2011: 441) cautions against a naturalist anti-intentionalism that has on occasions
flowed from Deleuzian philosophy, I shall carefully synthesise a sociology of affect that
draws inspiration from a tool-box (Malins 2006: 84) of Deleuzian and other anti-humanist 2
conceptualisations of affect, as set out in the following paragraphs.

Following Spinoza, Deleuze wrote about bodies and other entities as relational, having no
existence or integrity other than that produced through their relationship to other bodies,
things, ideas or social institutions, which are similarly contingent and ephemeral (Deleuze
1988: 123; Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 261). Assemblages (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 88)
of these relations develop in unpredictable ways around actions and events, ‘in a kind of
chaotic network of habitual and non-habitual connections, always in flux, always
reassembling in different ways’ (Potts 2004: 19). Assemblages develop at sub-personal,
interactional or macro-social levels (DeLanda 2006: 5), and have an existence, a life even,
independent of human bodies (ibid: 40; Ansell-Pearson 1999: 157-9).

In an assemblage, there is no ‘subject’ and no ‘object’, and no single element possesses

agency (Anderson 2010: 736); the conventional conception of human agency is replaced in
Deleuzian ontology by affect (Deleuze 1988: 101), meaning simply the capacity to affect or
be affected. An affect is a ‘becoming’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 256) that represents a
change of state of an entity and its capacities (Massumi 1988: xvi): this change may be
physical, psychological, emotional or social. Affects are ‘projectiles’(Deleuze and Guattari
1988: 400) that produce further affects within assemblages, producing the capacities of
bodies to do, desire and feel, and in turn producing subsequent affective flows. However,
because one affect can produce more than one capacity, affects flow ‘rhizomically’ (ibid: 7),
branching, reversing flows, coalescing and rupturing, supplying a diachronic and dynamic
understanding of production. The flow of affect within assemblages is thus the means by
which lives, societies and history unfold, by ‘adding capacities through interaction, in a world
which is constantly becoming’ (Thrift 2004: 61).

Flows of affect change a body’s capacities in one direction or another (Duff 2010: 625), and
may combine or cancel each other out. Each body, object, idea, subjectivity or other relation
is consequently a territory fought over by rival affects within assemblages (Deleuze and
Guattari 1988: 88-89). Territorialisation describes the dynamic production of entities within
assemblages, continually in flux. Sometimes these flows can de-territorialise a body into
what Deleuze and Guattari (1988: 9) call a line of flight, from territorialisation into new
subjectivities, actions or assemblages.3 Thus, a biomedicine-assemblage territorialises those
involved in a health care consultation, transforming a sick person into a patient, the
professional into a healer, and signs and symptoms into a disease (Author 2012: 95-8); fear of
an adversary may territorialise into flight, fight or simply fright. ‘Emotions’ can
consequently be powerful territorialising and de-territorialising affects.

These three elements of assemblage, affect and territorialisation are sufficient to synthesise
an anti-humanist sociology of emotions/affects. In a nutshell, this focuses upon assemblages
of human and non-human relations rather than upon individual ‘emotional’ bodies; on flows
of affect within assemblages rather than notions of agency attached to humans; on
territorialisations and de-territorialisations of capacities to do and feel rather than
deterministic social structures and fields; and upon ‘emotion’ not as an outcome in its own
right, but as part of the territorialising (and de-territorialising) flow of affect between
assembled bodies, things and ideas, and thus itself productive of capacities within
assemblages. Consequently, the sociological concern is no longer with what emotions are,
but with the capacities for action and interaction produced in bodies or groups of bodies
(Deleuze, 1990: 218). Part, but only part, of these capacities concerns what a body can feel
and how it affects other bodies or objects as a consequence of feelings or emotions (Deleuze
and Guattari 1988: 400).

While Deleuzian philosophy has influenced affect scholars such as Massumi (1996) and
Connolly (2011) who have asserted the significant part emotions play in directing human
action, my sociological focus upon the production of bodies and the social will carry my use
of the same anti-humanist framework in a different direction. Indeed, my formulation puts
into question whether, within the context of a wider affective flow that produces bodies, the
social world and human history, there is anything distinctive about emotions and feeling.
While ‘emotion’ and ‘affect’ are sometimes used synonymously (Massumi 1996: 221:
Tamboukou 2003: 216), Deleuze made a clear distinction between emotion as a subjective,
embodied experience, and affect as the capacity of a body, thing or collectivity to affect or be
affected, a ‘becoming-other’ (Deleuze and Guattari 1988: 400). Consequently, while
emotions and feelings may be affects (that produce states of bodies or minds), only a minority
of affects are emotions or feelings. I will explore this question fully below, re-evaluating the
significance of emotional responses to suggest a much broader view of the importance of
affect in producing bodies, social organisation and the institutions of society (Youdell and
Armstrong 2011: 145). This goes beyond a narrow concern with emotions, while at the same
time re-setting the terms of ‘intentionalist’ debates concerning the primacy of emotions and
reason.

From sociology of emotions to affect economy

To carry the argument forward, I will use the anti-humanist perspective and concepts set out
above to explore emotions and affects associated with romantic love: a social form,
phenomenon and emotion that has been the subject of much social scientific analysis and
debate (Belli et al. 2010; Jackson 1993). I begin not as a conventional sociology might, by
looking at experiential data, discourses or social structures, but with what I will call a ‘love-
assemblage’. A love-assemblage will comprise the human and non-human relations that
affect and are affected by each other as love happens, typically the lovers themselves, but
also friends, colleagues, families and other interested parties; and the many non-human
elements that may include the public and privates places and spaces where the lovers spend
time together; the food, drink and other consumables that form a backcloth to the interaction;
past experiences and relationship history; social norms and codes of love, relationships and
‘going out’ in Western culture; cultural models of masculinity, femininity and sexuality, and
so forth. However, this ‘love-assemblage’ has significance only in terms of the affects that
flow through it: it is a consequence of which affects flow that it becomes a ‘love’ assemblage
(as opposed to a ‘hate’, ‘creativity’, ‘health’ assemblage, or whatever).

Three elaborations of the model of assemblages and affects have bearing on how emotions
are to be understood in this perspective. First, that within a love-assemblage as with any
other assemblage, we will uncover many different kinds of affects, which produce all sorts of
different capacities to act or feel or desire. Some affects (say, a kiss or a hug) produce
physical effects such as arousal in a lover’s body. Affects can territorialise desires, perhaps
producing a decision to go out to an event or a ‘romantic’ meal, or a subjectivity (as
boyfriend, partner, couple), or even to end the affair. Relations in the love-assemblage may
affect or be affected by bodies, things or social institutions (for instance, a wedding and
subsequent marriage). A flow of affect that engages the necessary mix of specific bodies,
biology, cultural norms, events and experiences will produce a capacity to feel, what is
commonly called an emotional response such as love, sadness, jealousy or sexual desire
(Deleuze 1990: 246). ‘Emotions’ are thus best considered as capacities (to love, to care and
so forth), produced in the same way as, and entangled with other capacities.

Second, because affects produce capacities, these in turn will establish single or multiple
further affects, and thus the ‘affective flow’ in the assemblage. For example, watching a film
about injustice may produce anger (an ‘emotional’ capacity), a desire to donate money or
time to a campaign, and an identity as a campaigner, all of which in turn will lead to further
affects, ad infinitum. As affects, emotions in the love-assemblage alter or augment the
lovers’ capacities or desires, and consequently shape the potential for these bodies to affect
other relations in the assemblage, contributing to the flow of affect. Emotions thus sit
alongside ‘blows or words’ as part of a rhizomic flow of affects that may coerce, discipline,
habituate, subjectify, provide meanings or otherwise territorialise bodies and the social world.
Those such as love, anger or fear may be powerful motivators of action (Deleuze and Guattari
1988: 240), while even a ‘weaker’ feeling associated with a kiss or a gift may lead to a
decision to go to a movie, to have sex or get married. Because such flows are the means of
production of bodies, the social world and human history (Thrift 2004: 61), it is via this
affective flow that emotions contribute to social production.

Third -- and this is a significant and distinctive aspect of this anti-humanist sociology of
assemblages and affects, assemblages that incorporate bodies, things, social forms and
abstract concepts will frequently cut across micro- and macro-levels, public and private,
institutional and autonomous realms (Beckman 2011: 10). So, for example, a love
assemblage will link the bedroom to the boardrooms of Valentine’s Day card companies, the
clubs and pubs where attachments form, morph and evaporate, the manufacturers and
retailers of alcohol, beauty products and sex aids, even the pages of academic and medical
journals that discuss sexuality or emotions! While this undermines any sense that emotions
(as part of affective flows) are exclusively private, embodied phenomena, it establishes the
part emotions play within the flow of affect in producing cultures, social movements and the
sweep of history (DeLanda 2006: 32).
These three elaborations establish a perspective on emotions that both constrains and
massively enhances understanding of the part they play in social life. Still using the love-
assemblage as illustration, on one hand, a lover’s feelings/emotions are merely one
component in the wider affectivity that circulates through her/his body and life. Emotion is
not a ‘missing link’ between the biological and the social: actually such links must be
ubiquitous and commonplace in assemblages in which bodies are affected or affect:
physically, psychologically, socially or as reflexive subjects. Just because an emotion is ‘felt’
does not single it out from other ways bodies are affected by other bodies, things or ideas.
On the other hand, emotions (alongside other affects) perform an important role within the
flows that produce a lover, her/his unfolding life, and all the other relations that coalesce
around her/his actions, feelings, desires and interactions. The significance of an emotion is
not as a bodily response to an event, but as a capacity to affect.

Re-framing emotion as an element of affectivity focuses sociological attention upon the wider
processes of production of bodies and social life. Such an affective sociology spans arenas
from creativity and innovation to social stratification and governance (Author 2012, Clough
2008, Thrift 2004). Affect marks the passage of an entity from one state to another (Massumi
1988: xvi), and is thus the transformative principle that produces unfolding lives, social
organisation and dis-organisation, and the flow of history (Ansell Pearson 1999, Thacker
2005: 137). Clough (2004: 15) described this process of transformation as an ‘affect
economy’, in which affective capacities switch bodies ‘from one mode to another in terms of
attention, arousal, interest, receptivity, stimulation, attentiveness, action, reaction, and
inaction’. In this economy of affects, assemblages of bodies, subjectivities and experiences
flow together with social movements and organisations, political doctrines and geo-
economics. Similarly the assemblages that produce social institutions, social stratifications
and nation-states are invested with affects that link the capacities of human bodies to social
forms and systems of thought such as capitalism, patriarchy, nationalism, familialism and
heteronormativity (Clough 2008: 2, DeLanda 2006: 72, Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 292-3).

I disclosed (Author 2008a) such an affective economy in a study of Viagra use by people
with erectile dysfunction (ED). Here bodies, technologies, markets and biomedicine
assembled around a sexual capacity. One brief extract from an interview with a study
respondent known as ‘George’ can provide a flavour of this economy.

I was panicking because of not being able to maintain my erection ... sometimes it went
down totally, (which) was really disappointing my partner. From that moment I guess I
got performance anxiety. My best friend at the office introduced me to Viagra a week
after he saw my attitude change at the office due to my noticeable depression. Thanks
to Viagra, I feel I am gaining my manhood again, but now I’m lazy of doing sex
without the blue pill. I am now becoming a big fan of Viagra, and afraid of having sex
without (it).

The flow of affects in George’s assemblage may readily be discerned: affects deriving from
his erectile (in)capacity with his partner produced emotions -- performance anxiety, and then
feelings of depression that altered his behaviour. This led to his colleague suggesting he used
Viagra. The Viagra treatment had multiple affects, producing new physical capacities, a new
subjectivity (as a Viagra-enhanced man), and further emotions: joy at his new-found erectile
function and a new performance anxiety about attempting sex without pharmaceutical
assistance. The flow of affect thus progressively transformed elements within this ED-
assemblage. But within this affect economy were not only George, his partner, his colleague
and the Viagra tablet, but also the pharmaceutical company that produced it; biomedical and
scientific knowledge; the social relations of capitalist accumulation; government regulation
and licensing of medicines; the flow of money between health services, manufacturers and
consumers, and so forth (Author 2008a: 862). The flow of affect between George, Viagra
and all these other elements in the assemblage links bedroom and multinational corporation;
sexual performance and financial performance; while emotions (performance anxiety,
depression, self-esteem, admiration for the drug and more performance anxiety) played key
parts in sustaining the flow of affect that produced this unfolding sequence of events.

This brief illustration suggests that an affective sociology provides a means to analyse
theoretically and empirically not just flows of affects and desires, but also economies of
power and resistance in the on-going production of social life, from social divisions and
inequalities, through work and citizenship to social movements and change (Clough 2004:
19). It enhances a sociology of emotions by establishing the affective context within which
emotions produce capacities of bodies and collectivities to act, feel and desire; enables
sociological study of the disposition of affect and emotional capacities throughout the social;
and of the rhizomic production of new subjectivities and social forms, and the ‘possibilities
of lines of flight’ (Tamboukou 2003: 222) out of repression and oppression. Furthermore, it
permits diachronic sociological analysis that explores social and historical development and
change, as affects and emotions flow through assemblages.

Discussion

Having established a sociology of affective flow in which emotions play a part, I want to
return to where this paper began, to examine afresh the many (perhaps all) areas of social life
that possess an emotional component, but now informed by a holistic approach to generalised
affect, and released from the anthropocentric focus of both constructionist and interactionist
perspectives upon the emotional responses of bodies or individuals.4 Studies have noted the
ubiquity of emotions in social life, from collective outpourings of grief over the death of a
celebrity to the everyday laughter of children (Thrift 2004: 57). Sociological research has
also exposed the part emotions play in politics and protest (Jasper 2011: 286), social
movements (Ahmed 2004: 42; Bensimon 2012; Jasper 1998) and social change (Summers-
Effler 2002). From within the analysis developed in this paper, emotions are sociologically
interesting less as experiential feelings or in terms of emotion management (Bolton and Boyd
2003: 289), but as more or less potent products and producers of affect within assemblages of
relations. Consequently, analysis sets to one side speculations about cognitive or
neurochemical processes, or the biological or evolutionary purposes of emotionality
(Dalgleish 2004, Turner and Stets 1995: 6), to consider the more sociological issue of how
emotions and affects transform bodies and the world.

From the perspective of an affective sociology, we may attend to emotions as part and parcel
of the affective flows that produce these sociological forms. While Durkheim (1976: 218)
might have described popular uprisings in the Middle East, civil unrest or the behaviour of
football crowds as ‘collective effervescence’ providing social integration, an anti-humanist
perspective would re-analyse emotion in social protest in terms of assemblages within which
argument, law, ideology, social organisation, rights, physical coercion and emotions such as
anger and joy flow together to produce de-territorialisations and lines of flight, and where
what bodies can feel are considered alongside what they can do (Jasper 1998, Tamboukou
2006). Reason and emotion are no longer opposed or contradictory as in many sociological
analyses (Leys 2011), but components together within the broad flow that drives social
change or mob violence.

Sociological arenas ripe for such consideration include the interplay of emotion and reason in
religion, faith and rituals; the role of national commemorations and celebrations such as
Thanksgiving, May Day or Olympics in producing identity politics; interactions between
rational calculation and sentiment in the operation of stock, commodity and housing markets
(Venn 2010: 158); emotions in the workplace and labour process; and the part played by
‘moral panics’ in the creation, deployment and reproduction of social categorisations and
mobilisations (Ahmed 2004: 46-49). In all of these areas, as in the Viagra example noted
above, we may study empirically the affective flows and capacities to do and feel, which
together produce unfolding social life and human history.

As my intention in this paper has been to establish an empirically-useful sociology of affects

and emotions, I want to devote a small space to consider methodology. Sociologists who
have applied anti-humanist philosophy to empirical data have used a range of data sources
and analytical methodologies, often adapting anthropocentric methods such as interviews.
For example, Renold and Ringrose (2008: 320-1) used a mix of narrative interviews,
ethnographic data and group interviews; studies by Lambevski (2005) and Henriques (2010)
were observational; Potts (2004) drew on semi-structured interviews; Author (2008a) and
Ringrose (2011) both used a mix of online ethnography and interviews; while Youdell and
Armstrong (2011) applied auto-ethnographic reflections upon participant observation. Data
sources that can capture the flows of affect within assemblages, including narrative studies or
ethnographies that focus upon change as well as continuity, may be particularly valuable.

In many ways, the means of analysis is more important than the mode of data collection,
although most of these studies make no explicit mention of data analysis, presumably
applying standard interpretive approaches. The objective in an anti-humanist analysis is to
expose the impersonal flows of affect through assemblages and the productive capacities
these produce in bodies, rather than focus upon the ideas, actions and feelings of
individualised subjects (Youdell and Armstrong 2011: 145). The challenge is consequently
to move beyond the interpretations of respondents, who may have only limited awareness of
the relations, affects and assemblages that produce their actions, feelings, desires and
understandings. The analytic method developed by the author (Author 2008b) was inspired
by Deleuze’s (1988: 127-128) advice to document relations and affects in order to map body
territorialisation, and to explore the interactions between assemblages and the capacities they
produce in bodies (Deleuze and Guattari 1984: 3). It entails a close reading of qualitative
data to identify relations, affects and capacities. This is augmented with cultural analysis of
the immediate and broader contexts, in order to develop and enrich postulated assemblages of
relations and flows of affect. Reading across and between interviews and even multiple data
sources and studies progressively builds understanding of the territorialisations surrounding
what bodies do, feel and desire. A focus on assemblages bridges micro and macro, linking
relations at the ‘level’ of the body and body behaviours to the broad social, economic and
political relations of societies and cultures (Beckman 2011: 10).

As with all qualitative approaches, there is a risk of bias in this process, and while techniques
such as using data extraction forms, team-based analysis and ‘analytic induction’ (Robinson
1951) might be used to enhance ‘validity’, from a Deleuzian perspective it is clear that the
interpretive work involved in analysing assemblages and discerning affective flows
introduces what could be called ‘researcher bias’, but is more accurately described as a
‘research-assemblage’ with its own affective flow, one that produces sociological knowledge.
Indeed, this kind of sociology has to be seen as itself assembled, and shot through with
affects and territorialisations. Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988: 3-25) extended justification of
their own work as ‘rhizomic’ (and thus on the side of de-territorialisation) cannot de-
contextualise their readings or set them outside culture and history. Every de-
territorialisation is also a re-territorialisation (ibid: 54), a caution that anti-humanist sociology
must take to heart as it explores the affective flow of the social world.

Finally, while I have made a case for an anti-humanist approach to affects and emotions that
counters an anthropocentric analysis, some shortcomings to this approach must be raised.
First, and perhaps most fundamentally, the de-privileging of human agency in anti-humanist
social science may discomfit some sociological imaginations, sweeping away the humanistic
privilege accorded to life and to human agency and choices, be that based upon reason or
emotion. At the same time, anti-humanism undermines a theoretical basis for personal or
collective emancipation based on identity-politics, for instance in relation to gender or
sexuality (Braidotti 1996: 310; Grosz 1994: 163). Second, while a sociology of affects offers
insights into the production and transformation of bodies and social life, analysis will be
predominantly retrospective, as flows of affect within assemblages are detectable only as a
consequence of their effects (Thrift 2004: 63), limiting predictive capacity. Third, as noted in
my discussion of methods, there is need for social scientists applying anti-humanist
perspectives to fully address how they approach empirical data. Methods such as interviews
that traditionally provided sociology with insights into human agency and experience may
need to be re-engineered to address anti-humanist questions concerning assemblages, flows
of affect, body capacities, territorialisation and transformation; while acknowledging the
limited abilities of interviewees to be able to speak about, or even be aware of assemblages
and affective flows.

Conclusion

I began this paper by critiquing anthropocentric approaches to emotions, which I suggested

chart an uneasy path between the biological and the social aspects of emotions, and finished
by arguing that we attend more closely to the part that emotional flows play in producing the
social world. From within an anti-humanist perspective, the concept of emotion as an
individualised and cognitively-mediated embodied response to an environmental/social cue is
replaced with a generalised interest in flows of affect within relational assemblages of
animate and inanimate, material and abstract. Affective flows produce capacities in entities
(what they can ‘do’), and in the case of human bodies, capacities to feel: emotions. I have
thus shown that emotions and feelings are not simply visceral experiences produced by affect,
but also (as part of the affective flow) themselves productive: of bodies, collectivities, social
life and human history. Emotions are one element of how bodies and things affect and are
affected, alongside many other affects – from a physical force to a moral obligation.

Although this analysis displaces emotions from their supposed pivotal position between
biology and society (the latter produces many different capacities in bodies), it reinvigorates
sociological explorations of how emotions flow through social life, alongside rather than in
opposition to instrumental and ‘rational’ engagements. An affective sociology will focus not
upon bodies and subjectivities, but upon capacities and how they are modulated within an
affect economy that produces the world and everything in it.

Notes

1. In this context of this paper, as Buchanan (1997: 75) points out, asking what a body, or in
this case emotions do is not a functionalist question about purpose, but just about asking what
they actually do, what actions they perform and what effects follow.

2. For discussions of anti-humanism, see Ansell-Pearson (1999), DeLanda (2006), Deleuze

and Guattari (1988), Grosz (1994), Latour (2005), Manning (2010), Thacker (2005).
‘Deleuze-informed’ anti-humanist social science studies include Author 2012; Duff 2010;
Henriques 2010; Jordan 1995; Renold and Ringrose 2008, 2011; Ringrose 2011; Potts 2004;
Youdell and Anderson 2011).

3. While some writers see this formulation as a theory of resistance, it has also been the
subject of criticism. Thus Zizek (2004: 17-18) has argued it reflects a de-politicised or even
reactionary theory of resistance, replacing specific struggles to overthrow capitalist
production, patriarchy, heteronormativity and so forth with a generalised emphasis on
‘becoming’. Spivak (1988: 70) regards it as based in a romantic delusion that the
dispossessed and silenced may be given a voice through a theory of de-territorialisation and
lines of flight (for a commentary on Spivak’s critique, see Robinson and Tormey 2010).

4. The emphasis upon affects and social production does not resolve debates over whether
‘emotional’ reactions are predominantly biologically or socially determined, or if emotions
mark a pre-cognitive or non-rational source of human actions, but enables sociology to step
back from these questions.

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