Affective Methodologies

The motivation for this anthology is a challenge raised in the growing volume of academic work on affective processes — or what is often termed ‘the affective turn’ in contemporary cultural analysis (Clough, 2007; Thrift, 2008; Gregg and Seigworth, 2010; Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002; Blackman, 2012; Wethereil, 2012; Leys, 2011; Ahmed, 2004). The challenge under discussion is how to develop and account for methodologies that enable cultural researchers to investigate affective processes in relation to a certain empirical study. The collection’s main methodological focus is thus how to perform empirically grounded affect research. We define an affective method as an innovative strategy for (1) asking research questions and formulating research agendas relating to affective processes, for (2) collecting or producing embodied data and for (3) making sense of this data in order to produce academic knowledge. The aim of this edited collection is therefore not to challenge or deconstruct established methodological categories (e.g., research questions, data production and data analysis), but rather to begin experimenting with how these categories can be used and reinterpreted in inventive ways in order to engage with the immaterial and affective processes of social life. The chapters in the collection deal with the various elements of this definition in different ways: some focus more on starting points and asking questions, others more on the production or sense-making of data through the use of new analytical and conceptual approaches.

This chapter will explore the challenges of researching affect by developing a methodological apparatus that is sensitive to ‘starting points’, and that foregrounds the researcher’s own affective investments in the subject under investigation. It will reflect on whether we can only do research with which we are already entangled, and on that basis, what kinds of methods might allow for such sensitivities. The chapter will argue that methodological sensitivity is not an entirely human affair, and requires many eyes and ears — human and nonhuman — which can work with traces, gaps, absences, submerged narratives, and displaced actors in order to shape a form of mediated perception. Mediated perception and its methodological contours will be located within discussions of hauntology, ethos, liveliness, and the staging of ‘scenes of entanglement’, primarily indebted to the work of Karen Barad and Rey Chow. The chapter will reflect on the question of whether, and indeed what, performative methods are best suited to researching affect.

Some years ago, we established a pop-up laboratory at a suburban secondary school in Denmark. Let us call the school ‘X-school’. By the term ‘pop-up laboratory’, we mean a laboratory setting, or a ‘a place to work’, that pops up in a limited time at a particular place and that is designed for working (‘laborara’) with and testing assumptions on a particular research subject on the spot. Our ambition with this laboratory was to get closer to some of the precision mechanisms of new forms of biopolitics. Or, more precisely we were curious about how affects and senses are constructed and governed by new forms of educational leadership, when educational leadership expects students to affectively engage themselves in their own learning processes and to be committed and motivated for further schooling: How did the students feel about this management? How did they the experience to be a ‘human resource’ that could constantly be cultivated and potentialised? Borrowing Brian Massumi’s (2009) term, we might say that we were (and are still) interested in the ‘ontopower’ of today’s schooling and educational leadership, targeting cognition, perception, and affertivity as the objective as well as the means. However, in this chapter, we revisit the format of the pop-up laboratory and more particularly the visual methodologies that we used for producing empirical material. By critically scrutinizing the unintended effects of our lab and how the research design produced and experimented with conflicting affects, this text attempts to contribute with self-critical and nuanced reflections, rather than only celebrate or abandon our own experiment.

Looking for paths that have been disavowed, left behind, forgotten, silenced, covered over, and left unseen begins by performing juxtapositions of fragmented memory. In this chapter, I employ a performative, critical, and (un)locatable autoethnographic writing approach to explore the affective transmission of trauma. In my research, I am particularly interested in exploring how traumatic memory can affectively pass from one generation to the next across chronological time and geographical space — a concept referred to as intergenerational ‘hauntings’ (see Cho, 2008; Gordon, 2008; Abraham and Torok, 1994). My unique interest in ‘ghosts’, however, requires an equivalently unique methodology and epistemology that can adequately deal with such issues. In response, I ‘stage’ in this chapter different (un)locatable autoethnographic approaches that employ what I call a ‘diasporic montage’.¹ Throughout this paper, I unpack this discussion and demonstrate how the existence and composition of this very chapter, in fact, embodies my autoethnographic act of creating a ‘diasporic montage’. One key question I ask is: Can such methodologies ‘see’ ghosts, the forgotten, and the unseen?

While this chapter acknowledges the debt owed to studies of the representational, its primary purpose is to argue that much is overlooked by such analyses for the construction of meaning in the semiotic landscapes of heritage. Instead, the chapter points to styles of research practice that capture the essences of encounters and engagement in moments of emergent meaning within the affective and representational milieu of heritage. The chapter argues that such practice is exploratory, disrupting the conventional power of the researcher, and seeking both direct evidence of affect and proxy indicators of it in the intensities and mobility of feeling in time and place. To make this case, the chapter draws upon two case studies: the battlefield at Towton and Uluru-Kata Tjuta National Park. At both sites, our research style favored data that was generated primarily by respondents in situ and moments of encounter or reflection: via photographs, observed behavior and activity, reactions to situations, immersive ‘self-reporting’, ‘walk-throughs’, and reflective statements made in response to provocations of various kinds. Key to these explorations is the notion of ‘encounter’; through it, we focus upon the energies, realities, and responses of actual bodies as they move around and interpret places that present pasts. In doing so, we explore the opportunities and the challenges of developing research styles that facilitate these new approaches to heritage.

This chapter discusses the study of experience and affect in an ecstatic religious ritual.¹ More precisely it focuses on the gatherings of zikr Allah, performed three times a week among Danish Pakistani Sufi brothers who follow the transnational tariqa (path, order) called Naqshbandi Mujadiddi Saifi, named after the late shaykh Saif ur-Rahman, who passed away in 2010 and has his shrine at the outskirts of Lahore in Pakistan. At the zikr gatherings, young murids (followers) receive nur (light) reflected onto them by their shaykh. Nur Muhammadi is the preeternai light that God used to create Adam. The purpose of the zikr is to cleanse the heart of evil influences and transform the murids into pious Muslims. Furthermore, nur awakens the lata’if, the seven centers of the ‘subtle body’ of the murid. When this happens, the murid will often experience wajd (ecstasy), a state in which he will have bodily tics, cry laugh, shake, scream, or fall to the ground and lose all physical control.

Many of those working within or along with the so-called affective turn in the humanities do so following the Deleuzian (cf. 1997) understanding of affect as a force or kind of intensity to be thought separate from processes of signification or discursive construction, indeed, as something that fundamentally disturbs or challenges the stability of such structures of meaning. As such, Brian Massumi and Steven Shaviro both emphasize the distinction between affect and emotion, by insisting that, whereas emotions are meaningful and differentiated signifiers of affect, thus domesticated and segregated by the symbolic system (Massumi, 2002, p. 28), affect itself is ‘primary, non-conscious, asubjective or presub-jective, asignifying, unqualified and intensive’ (Shaviro, 2009, p. 3). A focus on the affective dimension of politics can therefore be part of the attempt to understand the nonsensical, bodily irrational, or in a sense ‘un-serious’ dimension of contemporary politics. This is a dimension which often escapes theories and methodologies focused on examining processes of ‘making sense’.

Studies of political art and art activist practices often focus on representations and expect that art, in a clear-cut manner, provides a critique of, for instance, various forms of suppression. Yet practice often transgresses representational patterns, disciplinary boundaries, and traditional notions of the art-work. In this chapter I develop an affectively oriented methodological framework for investigating art political practices, the effect of which cannot merely be perceived as a matter of representation. The methodology relies on an understanding, not of the art-work as a coherent category, but of the net-work that emerges as an open-ended assemblage (Latour, 2005; Delanda, 2006; Anderson et al., 2010). The focus on the net-work has implications for the study of political art and affect. Because when the focus is the net-work, affect cannot be studied and identified on its own. Affect must be identified in the ways in which the net-work materializes.

‘We do not lack communication. On the contrary, we have too much of it. We lack creation. We lack resistance to the present’, writes Gilles Deleuze (1994, p. 108). This is an assertion that runs counter to dominant discourses about academic writing, yet I will argue here that writing is a critical form of resistance to important aspects of the present, including the injunction to communicate in ways codified by the academy. Method, I aim to show, refers not only to the process of research but also to the process of making sense of that research in and through a writing that does not come afterward as a ‘writing up’ of what has previously been discovered, but is actually continuous with it, and, in large part, produces it. Writing in the Humanities, and increasingly in the Social Sciences, does not comprise an aftereffect of research, but forms its very fabric. Writing is not a transparent medium, nor something that comes somehow after the event, a simple ‘outcome’ of research that always takes place elsewhere, in the archive, in the field or the focus group, on the Web, but is a mode of inquiry in its own right. Thinking about the idea of writing as research in the late 1980s and early ‘90s, Australian theorists used the term ‘fictocriticism’ to describe ‘a way of writing for which there is no blueprint and which must be constantly invented anew in the face of the singular problems that arise in the course of engagement with what is researched’ (Gibbs, 2005). On the one hand this was thought by feminist theorists as an attempt to surprise the paternalistic voices of theory in action, to unveil them and reveal them for the partial rather than the universal view they in fact represent (Gibbs, 2005).

In this postscript, I want to reflect on one aspect of the arguments raised by many of the other chapters included here: what does the study of affect have to do with the empirical? The question ‘What is the empirical?’ is one that I have already posed in a collection with this title that I coedited with Lisa Adkins (Adkins and Lury, 2009). One of the contributions — that by Patricia Clough — provides a helpful starting point for me in returning to this question here, especially insofar as she situates her response to the question in relation to a history of the social sciences, and in particular, US sociology, in the postwar period. Her claim, following George Steinmetz (2005), is that sociology has been dominated by methodological positivism, evident not only in much quantitative sociology but also in some (perhaps much) qualitative sociology. She writes,

Most importantly, qualitative methodology privileged empiricism as methodological positivism does… So, although most qualitative meth-odologists assumed that empirical reality is only meaningful through interpretive processes, these processes were understood to be open to empirical investigation through ‘naturalistic’ observation … [which] presumes the obdurateness of the empirical world, or the independence of the empirical world from interpretation, while it takes for granted participants’ interpretations of their social worlds without suspecting participants of being subject to structurally informed limitations to their understanding or interpretations. Participants’ interpretations are simply part of the empirical world. (2009, pp. 45–46)

In a further step, Clough suggests that Steinmetz’s history points to a ‘complicity between sociological methodology and governance and economy … After all, [his] notion of an epistemological unconscious evokes that which is and must remain un-thought in the methods of sociology’ (2009, p. 45).