polity
Copyright © Jennifer Mason 2018
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First published in 2018 by Polity Press
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ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-2430-3
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‘Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it’
(Roald Dahl, The Minpins)
In researching and writing Affinities I have drawn upon and debated with the work of all kinds of fascinating thinkers, researchers, artists and writers, many of whom are cited in the book. Although I do not know all of them personally, I wanted to start by saying a general thank you for their willingness to put exciting ideas, thoughts and work out there for the rest of us to benefit from and engage with.
I am also very grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council, and to the Leverhulme Trust, for funding a range of projects which have fed into my thinking about affinities, and on which the book draws. I am especially grateful to all of the people who participated in those research projects, generously sharing their time and experiences with me and my colleagues.
I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to all of my colleagues past and present in the Morgan Centre for Research into Everyday Lives at the University of Manchester. The Morgan Centre was established in 2005, and it is no coincidence that it was around that time I began thinking about affinities. Collaboration and an irrepressible desire to think differently are at the very heart of the Morgan Centre, and these create a special atmosphere which encourages and nourishes all those involved. Being part of all this has given me the most wonderful and intellectually generous set of colleagues it is possible to imagine, as well as many exciting and stimulating times through conferences and events over the years. I consider myself very fortunate to be part of the vibrant conversations and associations that are the Morgan Centre.
I feel especially blessed to have worked with or been close to particular people who I know have shifted and shaped how I think about affinities, and lots else besides. In this regard I would especially like to thank Carol Smart, Becky Tipper and Katherine Davies, all of whom – in their inimitably different ways – have inspired and influenced my thinking and writing about affinities. Very special thanks to Andrew Jones who has lived with this book and its themes for as long as I have. It simply would not have come to fruition without his insights, encouragement, clarity of thought and endlessly generous support. Finally, thank you to Rosa and Joe for always having been both a grounding and an inspiration.
Excerpt(s) from The Minpins by Roald Dahl, text copyright © 1991 by Felicity Dahl and the other Executors of the Estate of Roald Dahl. Used by permission of Viking Children’s Books, an imprint of Penguin Young Readers Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Why does a woman who discovers relatives she never knew she had, feel so moved when she recognises a family resemblance with them? What does it mean when a life is changed through the serendipity of a chance encounter? How is it possible to have an affinity with a place? What is happening when someone feels almost literally transported to another place or time by a chance encounter with a smell or a texture or a song? In each of these cases, some kind of potent connection is being made, and experienced viscerally and personally. In this book I want to suggest these kinds of connections are affinities, and to explore what they are and how they seem to matter so much. Affinities do matter, and I suggest that taking them seriously and exploring them opens up new and exciting possibilities for conceptualising living in the world.
I am going to argue that affinities are potent connections that rise up and matter. They are encounters where it is possible to identify a spark or a charge of connection that makes personal life charismatic, or enchants, or even toxifies it. Affinities are those connections that feel ‘kindred’ in some way, or make things kindred, whether or not they involve a family or kinship link as conventionally defined, and indeed we shall see that affinities can take shape between elements other than people too. Crucially, affinities are personal connections that have potency. They can be affinities of opposition, alterity or negativity, just as much as affinities of resemblance, empathy and closeness. They can involve ephemeral and ethereal yet somehow defining and elemental connections, and even epiphanal ones. They may feel of us, in ways that seem inscribed or seared into us and yet they also seem to live beyond us and can feel capricious, anarchic, other-worldly and even lyrical and poetic. Affinities involve fascination, wondering and puzzlement, often about their very potency and ineffability.
The potency of the connections is the point, and that is where I want the focus of the book to be. Let me make it clear straight away therefore that this is not a book about kinship systems, where ‘affines’ are formally conceptualised as a specific category or order of kin (usually seen as kin by marriage). Indeed it is not a book about kinship in that sense at all, although I am interested in connections that feel kindred in some way. Neither is it a book that uses affinity as a device to study people who are strongly attracted to certain things, or pleasures, or behaviours, or indeed to other people. Both of these examples involve seeing affinities as to do with the fixed points that they connect (people, kinsfolk, pleasures, behaviours, things), and make the assumption that it is these fixed points, and possible correlations or patterns in them, that are of interest. Such an approach might tell us that young men of a particular social class are strongly attracted to online gaming for example.
My approach to affinities, however, is to understand them as connective charges and energies that are of interest in themselves and not because of what they connect. It is the character and potency of the connections that I want to explore, more than the points that they put in relation. Central to my arguments about affinities is that they constitute animate or living connections, and hence I focus a great deal on concepts like flows, forces and energies. Always something is thought to be moving, flowing, seeking, encountering, making and even forcing connection. Affinities are essentially living, and they are lived through multidimensional encounters and sensations in personal life.
Given that affinities are lived, they are also, ironically perhaps, parochial. I use the term parochial here not in the pejorative sense that has come to characterise it in recent years as the petty or insubstantial, but in a stronger, active and experiential sense to mean the medium and means through which we encounter the world. My reasoning is that our activity of living is always done locally (locally to ourselves) through the medium, as it were, of our own personal ‘parish’. I had been thinking about parochialism and its connection with the concept of personal life in this way for some time, when I came across Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful interpretation of Patrick Kavanagh’s ‘The Parish and the Universe’, in his introduction to Nan Shepherd’s The Living Mountain. Following Kavanagh, Macfarlane suggests that the parochial is ‘not a perimeter but an aperture: a space through which the world [can] be seen’ (Macfarlane, 2011: xv, my emphasis). This idea of an aperture on the world echoes the argument I want to make that the parochial is not an insubstantial quality of existence, nor is it a fixed locale, but instead – and in keeping with the concept of personal life (Smart, 2007) – it is nexus, medium, mode and locus for our engagement with the world and, as such, it can sometimes channel potent connections, or affinities. It is how affinities can feel powerfully and simultaneously of us, and beyond us.
Perceiving and apprehending affinities in these kinds of ways means we need to allow ourselves to think differently and openly, even or especially when we feel confined by conventional disciplinary orientations. It is in this sense that I want to suggest that affinities, as I develop them in this book, constitute an invitation to think and theorise differently. They invite us to imagine connections, charges and energies that cannot be contained within, or done justice by, existing sociological modes of thought. They tantalise and beckon us to think more boldly, freely and poetically about how we understand living in the world.
The book is therefore written as an invitation, a beckoning, a suggestion of an orientation, rather than as a treatise or a framework. I do not ‘cover’ all possible ‘types’ of affinity (indeed I do not deal in ‘types’ of affinity at all). Instead, I take you on a journey through examples and illustrations of what affinities can involve, woven together with an alternating and cumulative argument about how we might understand their potencies. I want to encourage you to imagine and attune to affinities as potent connective charges and energies. I want to tantalise and beckon you to imagine and then reimagine affinities in your own fields, and in your own personal lives as well for that matter. In the pages that follow I show what happens when we shift our lenses and lexicons to be able to capture or attune to affinities that I argue come alive in sensations. I go on to suggest that understanding affinities means we need to be able to apprehend energies, forces, flows and charges which can take shape as ineffable kinship, or ecological connection, or the ‘socio-atmospherics’ of personal life. The three parts of the book – part 1, ‘Sensations of Living’; part 2, ‘Ineffable Kinship’; and part 3, ‘Ecologies and Socio-Atmospherics’ – correspond to these sets of ideas and they constitute layers in the cumulative argument. Thereafter, I conclude the book with a discussion of ‘Affinities in Time’, arguing that the allure and enigma of time is crucial in all this, but that we need to see beyond conventional linear understandings of temporality to be able to appreciate in what ways. In the conclusion I also return to consider the possible implications, for sociology in particular, of accepting the invitation of affinities to think differently.
To do all this I have adopted a somewhat unconventional approach to writing and compiling the book, which is inspired by ‘facet methodology’ – an approach developed by colleagues and myself at the University of Manchester (Mason, 2011). The main premise of facet methodology is that we can use ‘flashes of insight’ gained through an exploration of strategically and artistically chosen facets of a problem – rather than attempting (and usually failing) to describe and document all dimensions of the problem in its entirety. The argument is that these ‘artfully’ chosen facets can offer strongly resonant and evocative forms of understanding and insight.
What this means for the book is that I have structured each of the three main parts to allow me to present a carefully chosen range of facets, whilst embedding these in a cumulative argument about affinities. Each part of the book is structured in the same way, beginning with an introduction that asks why the concepts developed in that part might be useful. Each then takes the reader on a journey through a set of ‘facets’ – in part 1 these are ‘facets of sensation’; in part 2 they are ‘facets of ineffable kinship’; and in part 3 they are ‘facets of ecologies and socio-atmospherics’. The facets are drawn from a range of sources that I have chosen because they express or illustrate something important or resonant about the energies of affinity. These sources include the arts and literature, current affairs, broadcast radio, poetry, music, academic research, and various forms of creative and autobiographical writing. Each facet, in a sense, is a stand-alone piece, and some of them contain analysis and commentary to feed into the argument about affinities. And yet it is best for the facets to be read together and in sequence, because there are threads that link them, and because they have been chosen to illuminate distinctive and important aspects of affinities. In each part of the book the facets are then followed by a ‘layering’ of the argument about affinities, which draws insights from the facets in that part of the book, and also engages with relevant literature, debate and theorising. Ideas and themes bubble up and are reinforced cumulatively throughout the book in these layers of argument. The conclusion then adds the fourth and final layer, in its focus on ‘affinities in time’.
For ease of reading, facets and the layerings of the argument are presented in different fonts.
We sense others. We know what they are like and who they are by seeing, touching, smelling, hearing and generally experiencing the sensations of them, at the same time as they are experiencing the sensations of us. We know what it feels like to be with and apart from them and in that sense our relations generate sensations. We know how they are with us (their manner of being with us, of interacting with us, their character and demeanour with us and so on) in these ways. More than that, we do not even have to be physically with others in the moment to experience the sensations of them, and of being with or connected to them, because sensations can be manifest in memory and imagination, just as longing or dread about the company of another can be experienced in sensory-kinaesthetic ways. We can conjure up as well as remember the sensations of others and how they are with us. Such sensations can form part of the weight of grief for example, felt as sensations of the mind, soul, head and chest. Contrary to popular assumption, online and ‘virtual’ interactions are also full of sensations, often bringing faces to faces quite literally in direct interactions with one’s own and others’ faces and bodies, words (spoken or created and experienced in text and symbols), language, sound and noises, immediate environments – and all this viewed on our screens, physically felt, sensed and executed through our bodies, including our fingers as we stroke and tap our devices, aurally heard and encountered in our earphones (see, for example, Jamieson, 2013; Morgan, 2009: 106–7; Wilding, 2006). It is in these ways that the experience of living routinely involves tuning into its sensory-kinaesthetics.
Of course, once we start to think about it, all life is lived in and through these sensory-kinaesthetic registers – even the so-called ‘virtual’ – but they are not usually factored into sociological understandings of relationships. Except perhaps sometimes in the sphere of romantic relationships and sexual attraction (and even there the focus is more usually on appearance as an individual characteristic or a personal preference), most analyses of relationships and relating are curiously drained of any sensations, to the extent that a scholar of relationships might be forgiven for thinking that sensations are not involved at all. Yet in everyday life it is well known that sensations are important: for example, whether or not we experience touch, or face-to-face contact in our personal relations with various others, and what it feels like; whether certain interactions are experienced as full of noise or silence, movement or stasis; whether we sense a good vibe between people or an atmosphere that you could ‘cut with a knife’; the capacity of a particular smell or a piece of music to evoke particular occasions in our relationships with others, or to virtually transport us to them. These kinds of examples point to the constitutive role of sensations in social life and interactions, as well as the need for those who wish to study and explain these things – like sociologists – to engage in a sensory-kinaesthetic attunement.
Part of the problem with sensations is probably that sociologists and others do not quite know what to do with them when it comes to analysing relationships, even though as people who live in the world and have their own relationships, they must understand their importance at some level. So even though there is increasing interest in the anthropology of the senses and environmental philosophy (for example, Abram, 1997; Classen, 1992, 2012; Howes, 1991; Howes and Classen, 2014; Pink, 2015), or the sociology of the senses (Lyon and Back, 2012; Mason and Davies, 2009; Riach and Warren, 2015; Vannini et al., 2011; or the journal The Senses and Society, established in 2006) or indeed the sociology of the body or embodiment (for example, Burkitt, 2010; Crossley, 2006; or the journal Body and Society, established in 1995), these do not have a great deal to say about sensations in relationships. For the most part they prefer to keep the level of analysis at either the ‘self’ or ‘society’ or ‘culture’. If we look more specifically from the perspective of the families, relationships and intimacies field, we have seen an interesting ‘cultural turn’ away from more abstract structuralist approaches, with a greater focus on relationships as everyday practices which can include exploring the role of feelings (as in emotions), embodiment, or of things and objects (for example, Gabb, 2008; Gillis, 1997; Morgan, 1996; Smart, 2007). And there have been interesting developments in interpersonal dynamics and the psychology of ‘affect’, which explicitly wants to draw emotion into the frame (for example, Brennan, 2004; Wetherell, 2012). But notwithstanding these, and with some notable exceptions (for example, Davies, 2015; Widerberg, 2010), relationships still are often analysed without much or any attention to sensations that might characterise or constitute them, and indeed often without recourse to a sensory-kinaesthetic register of any sort. Alternatively ‘the sensory’ is often analysed without much or any attention to relationships or to the mutualities and dynamics of sensations. As a consequence, it is still perfectly respectable to conceptualise a ‘relationship’ as a rather abstract thing that has little or nothing to do with sensation, which is, I think, a pity. In opposition to this, I am going to argue in this part of the book that sensations constitute a ‘core seam’ in our relationships with others (see also Mason, 2008), rather than simply our way of perceiving them, or a kind of adjunct to them (for example, as we might think of ‘relationships and the senses’).
My use of the term ‘sensation’ is quite deliberate, and yet requires certain caveats. ‘Sensation’ is defined in the Oxford Dictionary of English as ‘a physical feeling or perception resulting from something that happens to or comes into contact with the body’ (ODE, 2005). I am loosening and taking liberties with that definition somewhat, so that for me ‘sensations’ encompass the idea that they are not only felt, perceived and experienced in ‘the body’, but also that they emanate and flow in things that happen, and things coming into contact. Furthermore, it is an important part of the argument I develop in the book that we think generously and innovatively about what those ‘things’ that happen or come into contact might be. So instead of sensations being the felt effect of external stimuli, perceived or received via bodily receptors or mental faculties, I will argue that they flow through and are generated in encounters. This is crucial in my argument, and requires a more open and interactive conceptualisation than is sometimes applied to the idea of ‘the senses’ in the social and human sciences. What is more, in using the concept of sensation I want to gain a distance from the conceptualisation of particular senses as individual and mutually distinct, either from each other, or as separable from the experience of living in, moving within, relating with and apprehending the world. I am following Merleau-Ponty (2002 [1945], 2004 [1948]), Benjamin (1999), and in particular Ingold (2000, 2011) in this approach, but I shall also draw other ideas and insights into the frame.
Once we start to take sensations seriously, as I try to do in this part of the book, something else happens however. If my starting point was a desire to ‘inject’ sensations into the lacking-in-sensations study of interpersonal relationships, I quickly realised that sensations will not be contained in such a framework, and neither will the affinities they express. The energies and sensations of affinities operate not only within but way beyond and outside of interpersonal relationships, and this part of the book is thus a gateway to a much wider appreciation of affinities in the book as a whole. The major premise of this part of the book is that affinities are lived, made up of, and made potent through and in sensations. We might usefully see sensations as part of the habitat of affinities, or as an essential element in the atmospherics that can create affinities. And at the same time the visceral, moving and affecting nature of sensations is an important clue to understanding the potency of affinities. But we cannot appreciate and apprehend all of this unless we are prepared to tune into the sensory-kinaesthetics of the world around us.
What follows is a selection of facets, which are designed to illustrate and help to explore some of the ways that sensations are implicated in affinities, and in constituting them as more or less potent. In writing the facets I have consciously tried out a sensory-kinaesthetic attunement, directing this to a range of encounters and materials that help to draw to light the centrality of sensations in interpersonal relationships. This involves writing differently and variously across the facets. I have chosen to include facets with the aim of creating insights into sensations and the part they play in affinities, rather than representing a particular range or making any claims about propensities and patterns. The aim is to enable you to see what sensations can be in the world and maybe, hopefully, to inspire you to wonder about sensations and affinities that touch you, and to use this kind of attunement in your own field. After the facets, I draw together some of the threads and engage with wider literature and debate, so that I can take forward some propositions and ideas about affinities – in the process moving beyond the confines of interpersonal relationships – into the next part of the book.