Abstract
Drawing from studies of affect, this article explores how affect theory can inform how we theorise schedules. The notion of the schedule, of great interest to sociologists, has mostly been explored from a constructionist approach. The current article extends these readings, proposing the concepts of ‘scheduling in motion’ and ‘affective scheduling’, through which scheduling is explored as a relational and affective process. In doing so, it positions affective scheduling as a mode of inquiry that embraces the multiplicity and fragmentation of lived time. From this vantage point, I highlight how scheduling is felt, sensed and materialised in ways that bypass realms of demarcated temporal patterns. Important in this respect is the understanding that scheduling is a grouping together of heterogeneous elements, emerging in moments of encounters between bodies. This study is a first step to addressing the potential of affective scheduling in exploring everyday lived experiences, temporality and affection.
Introduction
‘When will we meet?’; ‘It’s been ages since we last spoke’; ‘We must catch up soon’; ‘Until we meet again’; ‘See you around.’ These are just a few examples of the commonplace, seemingly trite expressions related to scheduling time with others. However, these oft-repeated expressions can also be telling examples of how scheduling time is lived and felt. My interest in this study is to explore the scheduling of time through the lens of affect theory, asking how affectivity can make a difference in how we theorise schedules and, concomitantly lived time.
The notion of the schedule (along with the clock and the calendar) has been of great interest to sociologists of time (Lahad, 2012, 2017, 2019; Zerubavel, 1979, 1981).Notably, schedules have long been framed within the constructionist paradigm, understood as a collective social construct inherently rooted in the continuous process of signifying, marking and measuring time (Adam, 1995; Zerubavel, 1979, 1981). Through his exploration of how schedules developed historically within different social contexts, Zerubavel’s (1979, 1981) work has become foundational to research in the sociology of time in several ways. One key aspect is his use of a constructivist-contextualised interpretive tradition, in which schedules are both produced by and produce social norms – what he terms the socio-temporal order. For Zerubavel, scheduling is a cognitive process, and schedules are addressed as a mental construction: an artefact, dispelling the presumption of a natural, universal temporal order (Lahad, 2017; Zerubavel, 1979, 1981).
Drawing primarily on affect theory developed by Deleuze and Guattari (1988) and Massumi (1995, 2002), I contend that an affective reading of schedules offers exciting opportunities for exploring them as a relational, interconnected process, rather than a mere discursive construction. Such a position refrains from exploring scheduling as solely reliant on fixed temporal coordinates (a week or years, for example) along overarching temporal categorisations (linear or cyclical time). In this regard, scheduling is not merely interwoven within socio-normative frameworks and linguistic modes of expression; it also involves ongoing entanglements – an interconnectedness of various forces, flows and impulses that cannot be fully captured by linguistic representational models.
The goal of this study, therefore, is to bring into focus scheduling in motion, directing attention to how scheduling moves and is moved: how it is felt, sensed and materialised in ways that bypass constructivist traditions of signified socio-temporal orders. Along this line of thought, I coin the concepts of scheduling in motion and affective scheduling introducing a new conceptual orientation that seeks to explore how scheduling both emerges and triggers a range of vibrational movements and sensations. This approach necessitates a change in perspective, from what schedules represent to what they do. Within this scope, I refer to scheduling as a verb (to schedule, scheduling), deliberately challenging static, noun-based conceptualisations. In employing this mode of analysis, I approach scheduling as a connecting intensity with agentic capacities. Scheduling does things, moving us and connecting us to different kinds of bodies (including non-human ones) in heterogeneous ways.
Contributing to the sociology of time, the conceptual schema of affective scheduling opens up a way to explore the intersection of time and affects through their fragmented and elusive manifestations. In the opening section of this article, the conceptual orientation of affective scheduling is carefully articulated to provide a robust foundation for the subsequent analysis. In the second part of the article, the exploration shifts to exemplify how affective scheduling offers novel avenues through the theoretical exploration of keeping in touch among friends, including thinking about and sensing the presence of one’s friend.
This study proposes that affective scheduling provides a compelling framework for rethinking the notion of keeping in touch, as a configuration of affective and temporal processes. This modification allows us to expand the concept of keeping in touch, not simply as a synchronised interaction based on socially constructed temporal markers and coordinates, but as an affective, temporal and fragmented process that unfolds between human and non-human agencies.
This affective reading privileges the dispersed, ephemeral qualities of keeping in touch. From a Deleuzian-Massumian angle, this article illuminates the fragmented, ephemeral qualities of keeping in touch, emphasising its capacity to evade fixed emotional and temporal categories. In the final section of the article, I apply the concept of affective scheduling to explore how thinking about friends, sensing the presence of friends provides a crucial – albeit understudied – way of staying engaged and doing time.
At this point, I further suggest that using affective scheduling as a framework can be applied to exploring the temporal dynamics of friendship, including the subtle, quiet and potent fluctuations of affective intensities. This orientation is intended as a provocation, setting out to challenge established paradigms and opening new avenues for theorisation, rather than presenting a comprehensive model. It constitutes a first step in addressing the multiple potentialities of affective scheduling as a new analytical platform. Hence, this is a theoretical article and I consider my commentary here as primarily analytical. To illustrate my position, I will begin by first discussing the value of affect studies to the conceptualisation of schedules; working towards that end brings schedules studies in conversation with affect theory. In what follows, I will illustrate how the concept of affective scheduling can be effectively deployed by discussing friendship temporalities.
Theoretical Framework
Across a series of works, the sociologist Zerubavel (1985) theorised how clocks, calendars and schedules became indispensable tools for foregrounding the socio-temporal ordering of modern societies. In Zerubavel’s (1985: 31) words, schedules are ‘probably most responsible for the establishment and maintenance of temporal regularity in our daily lives’. Among other influences, Zerubavel’s (1980) refined outlook applies Georg Simmel’s (in Wolff, 1950) formal sociology in founding the sociology of time. Accordingly, schedules can be read as a social form, constructing a potent mental reference framework employed by social actors to synchronise collective life.
Schedules, indeed, have long been considered a significant tool for temporal orientation, as well as a potent mechanism for conformity. Wide swaths of thinking continue to explore the socially produced effects of schedules in different social settings through the ways humans employ schedules in everyday life. Time researchers (e.g. Lahad, 2012, 2017, 2019; Charmaz, 1991; Daly, 1996; Sharma, 2014; Zerubavel, 1979, 1981) have scrutinised how schedules are regimented and standardised. These in turn, are entwined with conditions of normativity, as such constructing the seemingly neutral and objective qualities of time regimes. Resonating with this line of inquiry, researchers including Lahad (2017) and Sharma (2014), for example, have underscored time norms as a tool of social control, with normative scheduling continuing to exercise control over others (Lahad, 2017; Halberstam, 2005; Sharma, 2014).
Notably, there is now a long tradition of scholarship exploring the ways in which temporality can transpire in more than a linear fashion. Halberstam (2005) and Freeman (2010) have criticised the explanatory force of normative linear logics, and by extension its classificatory devices. Constellating mostly around a constructionist representational ontology, these works attempt to envision scheduling in a way that denaturalises time along its seemingly objective and universal attributes. These critical approaches also aim to debunk the essentialising authoritative tone when employing temporal discourses and their attendant templates, such as age and the life course.
Clearly, significant theoretical depth can be gleaned from these scholarly traditions. Within this body of literature, researchers have examined schedules as socio-discursive articulations of couple culture (e.g. Lahad, 2012, 2017) and family life (Daly, 1996), as well as gendered reproductive schedules (Lahad, 2017; Halberstam, 2005) and corporal normative able-bodied ones (Kafer, 2013), providing valuable insights into how schedules encode and reproduce socio-temporal meanings alongside the discursive mechanisms that induce and sustain them.
Kafer (2013), for example, promotes the idea of ‘crip temporalities’, a position that unsettles the privileging of able-bodied schedules and their associated temporal regimes. Indeed, common to these works is the perception of schedules as a social construct; an interactional accomplishment produced and embedded with social life. While my line of discussion here is very much indebted to this significant scholarly tradition, my intention is to supplement its representational ontologies and epistemologies.
Turning to the field of affect studies, this theoretical perspective aims to add analytical purchase to scheduling as a continuous and scattered set of affective encounters. In particular, as I will explore further, my work draws on Deleuze and Guattari’s (1988) and Massumi’s (1988, 2002) conceptualisations of affect. Affect, as Massumi (1988: 83) states, is a ‘prepersonal intensity corresponding to the passage from one experiential state of the body to another and implying an augmentation or diminution in that body’s capacity to act’.
Emotion, by way of contrast, is considered as the sociolinguistic encoding of intensities. In this sense, affect is seen as separate from language and discourse; emotion, by way of contrast and according to Massumi (2002) is the capturing and classification of intensities within a signifying order. In a related vein, Thrift (2004: 236) approaches affect as a ‘set of flows moving through bodies of humans and other beings’. Affect is not personal feeling but rather a ‘sense of push in the world’ (Thrift, 2004: 60). This aligns with the concept of affect as a prepersonal intensity (Massumi, 1995, 2002), produced and released through interactions and connecting various bodies, both human and more-than-human.
These theories have evolved from a Deleuzian-Guattarian reading of the body pivotal to the conceptualisation of affective schedules (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988). For Deleuze (1988: 127), ‘A body can be anything: it can be an animal, a body of sounds, a mind or an idea; it can be a linguistic corpus, a social body.’ What is particularly germane here is a rearticulation of the body that subverts the idea of the singular, bounded and given perception of the individual human body, rejecting the ontological essence ascribed to human subjectivity, interiority and intentionality.
Together with Félix Guattari, Deleuze (1988) explores bodies in their broadest sense, encompassing more-than-human forms and destabilising the unitary perception of the self.They assert that bodies are, in fact, bodies without organs (BwO) (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988) – a claim that disrupts the conventional understanding of the body as a fixed, organic entity. In this view, the body is not an isolated, coherent structure, but rather an ever-changing assemblage, continuously engaged in a fluid network of interrelations.
These relations, which extend beyond the human, blur the boundaries between the human and the non-human, underscoring the body’s ongoing process of becoming. In this regard, the body transcends a fixed, predetermined form acting as a site of multiplicities, perpetually reshaped through its interactions with other bodies, forces and material conditions. Implicitly, one central aspect I wish to explore is how this perspective can illuminate the role of more-than-human actants in the processes of scheduling and sensing time.
To conclude this subsection, we could say that these understandings open a space to address scheduling beyond naming and classifying, harking instead to what Stewart (2007: 1–2) portrays as ‘the varied, surging capacities to affect’, one that put bodies into motion. In what follows, I will lay out some of the registers of affective scheduling, discussing how and why this conceptual lens can broaden our understanding of scheduling time.
Affective Scheduling and Scheduling in Motion: Some Analytical Considerations
As a means of theorising the relational and affective temporalities of scheduling and in proposing a novel stance to researching schedules, I have coined the terms scheduling in motion and affective scheduling. Integrating an affective perspective both extends and disrupts constructivist ontologies, offering fresh insights into the rich heterogeneity and layered complexity of scheduling. By focusing on these lived experiences, we move beyond what Fox and Alldred (2017) succinctly term as the overarching sociological accounts of ‘social structures’, ‘systems’ or ‘underlying mechanisms’.
I propose to consider schedules as a stream of continual movements, overlapping and exerting the circulation and transmission of unqualified intensities. In consonance with this argument and in repudiating a position that assumes that schedules are simply social constructs, subject to discursive analysis and revelation, affective scheduling prompts us to ask: what does scheduling do? How does it spread, circulate, amplify and generate flows of affective intensities between myriad bodies?
In introducing the term scheduling in motion, my aim is to move beyond this top–down position and to explore what schedules do from a new perspective. In other words, I develop the idea of scheduling in motion to describe the ongoing oscillations of scheduling time, akin to the reverberations of affect – always moving, intensifying and transforming. As a malleable and an affective resonant experience, schedules constitute a site of perpetual transformation and an affective movement of becoming.
This reframing corresponds with the Deleuzian-Massumian (1987) reading of affects and offers a powerful framework for understanding the dynamic configurations of scheduling time and how scheduling moves and matters. An expanded perspective on the process of scheduling provides a new lens through which to highlight the intensities of temporal experiences. Hence scheduling is affected and affects numerous entities; it is neither confined to an individual body nor to an ideology or a particular social order.
This aligns with Colman’s (2005: 11) ample contention of affect as ‘the change, or variation, that occurs when bodies collide, or come into contact’. In going beyond constructionist and discursive framings of time, a sociology of affective scheduling is implicated in an ongoing process of disruptive fluctuations, engaging with temporal flows in an open-ended manner. This formulation enhances the understanding of timelines as an interplay of continuity and disruption – an ongoing process of re-composition that is attuned to the evolving dynamics of multi-scalar temporalities.
In a similar vein, I contribute to the sociology of time by questioning the linear, sequential imagery often associated with the flow of time (Greenhouse, 1996; Halberstam, 2005). By contesting this prevailing conception this view advocates a greater temporal heterogeneity, whereby multiple events can unfold simultaneously, without a clear origin or predetermined future. In doing so it stresses that scheduling dynamics are fluid and diverse, never adhering to a fixed rhythm or single trajectory.
By extension and continuing this realm of analysis, I develop the concept of affective scheduling to further challenge the limitation of representational approaches in theorising schedules. In my effort to expand representational ontologies and epistemologies, I aim to explore the affective experiences of schedules, transcending the framework of discrete, measured and allocated events. This standpoint seeks to reorient scholarly attention towards how scheduling is sensed as an affect, and the affective flows it generates, affording greater latitude for thinking about temporalities in a more diffuse and visceral manner.
To refine the argument presented, it is essential to acknowledge that the act of scheduling time frequently operates on an immediate, even intuitive, somatic level, thereby complicating any attempt to address it solely within representational registers. In coining the term affective scheduling, I propose that conceptualising scheduling as an affective force illuminates temporal dynamics that cannot be captured by hidden truths and ‘discourse-centric explorations’ (Bissell, 2009: 911). These perspectives lend novel insights into the visceral and abstract qualities of scheduling and its capacities of doing time.
Social theorists such as Navaro (2012), Bissell (2009, 2010b) and Stewart (2007) urge us to relinquish closed discursive articulations, homogenising structures, and underlying cause-and-effect type of logic. In further support of Stewart’s (2007: 5) rigorous take on ordinary affects, it is important to underscore the processual capacities of affects, which in turn slow down the quick jump to representational thinking and evaluative critique. Intrinsic to this formulation is the post-humanist tradition rejecting the idea of human exceptionalism. This opens new ways for exploring the messy configurations of human and other-than-human agencies as they perpetually shift and evolve.
Harnessing this stream of thought engages with scheduling as a more-than-human process, one that is deeply ingrained in material relations. In this vein, I propose that the affective scheduling approach is attuned to the complexities of non-human agencies, and temporal processes, opening a broader understanding of more-than-human scheduling. Put differently: affective scheduling establishes a basis for transcending human exceptionalism, conceived as a process that emerges through the relational dynamics among a variety of entities – human, non-human, technological and environmental – that coalesce into intricate configurations.
Also central to the concept of affective scheduling is its irreducibility to measurable, sequential and chronological temporalities. The irreducibility of scheduling arises from the complex interplay of affective intensities – sensory fluctuations, moods, transient glimpses, disruptions and sensations – that resist synthesis into a singular, deterministic timeline. This complexity also challenges dualist thinking, blurring the boundaries between agency and structure, power and resistance, the human and the non-human, as well as the self and the other. Through this, it disrupts conventional dichotomies, emphasising the interconnectedness and fluidity of scheduling time.
Colebrook (2002: 56) uses the bicycle as an example to underscore this point: think of a bicycle, which obviously has no ‘end’ or intention. It only works when it is connected to another ‘machine’ such as the human body; and the production of these two machines can only be achieved through connection. The human body becomes a cyclist in connecting with the machine; the cycle becomes a vehicle.
To sum up this section and taking issue with Colebrook’s proposition, I suggest that affective scheduling arises from the perception of schedules as an ongoing composition of affective and material forces, reconfigured beyond representational humanist frameworks. In this context, schedules are not fixed entities but dissolve into a complex web of social and material interrelation, acquiring continuity through its affective engagements with other entities.
To illustrate this mode of analysis, the following sections analyse the affective process of ‘keeping in touch’ as a non-sequential series of affective movements, ones that fold and unfold, appearing and fading in changing intensities of tension, density and release. In what follows, I insert vignettes from my own experiences of scheduling time with friends, asking how affective scheduling can help us think about the everyday of affective temporalities, such as in keeping in contact and in thinking about friends.
Keeping in Touch as an Illustrative Example
Take the example of the affective agitations created when a friend complains about traffic congestion and the lack of parking space in the city centre when scheduling time to finally meet. Eventually, you decide to postpone the meeting. You feel uncomfortable and restless. During a previous conversation, you had been preoccupied with your own difficulties at work. Now, you sense that your friend is distant, and you are not sure why. Later, talking to a different friend, you are constantly distracted by the sound of notifications from your mobile phone. The play of sensations can decrease and intensify, hovering just on the verge of being named. This persistent agitation stabilises, but only momentarily. Your conversation is continually disrupted by external noises; now the unsteady Wi-Fi connection keeps interrupting the conversation. Let’s catch up, you both say, laughing. The conversation ends.
Keeping in touch varies in its intensity. Friends can draw away from or towards each other, become closer or more distant, without abiding to explicit tempos or well-defined paths. As the above reflection demonstrates, scheduling time to meet with friends and keeping in touch is an affectively charged temporal experience that can stretch backward, forward and across different points in time. These dynamics can be conceptualised as a constellation of disjointed elements that emerge within fragmented rhythms, emphasising the disruptions that intervene in the continuous flow of time and friendship experiences.
Diverting our attention from exploring keeping in touch through a representational framing to an exploration of what it does and activates underscores its transformative and agentic capacities. In other words, the affective perspective offers a valuable lens through which the subtleties of keeping in touch are examined, offering new insights not only into how scheduling feels but also to what scheduling does and evokes. From this perspective, the tone of ‘let’s catch up’ emerges as a nexus where different affective temporalities are both activated and propelled.
In this light, the concepts of affective scheduling and scheduling in motion offer a valuable lens for understanding how friends keep in touch beyond linear, chronological and sequential timelines, as well as a lens for codified temporal emotions. In a related vein, this viewpoint underscores the limitations of analysing closed narratives or grand events, advocating instead for a focus on the mundane, almost imperceptible moments that constitute the affective tonalities of keeping in contact. This line of theorising is reminiscent of Lorimer’s (2005) take on the more-than-representational. For him, this perspective offers a departure from the established representational habit to search for fixed meanings and values that are assumed to be awaiting discovery.
To elucidate, the emphasis on pivotal events or significant occurrences in friendship bonds often overlooks the subtle, imperceptible moments that shape friendship ties. Inspired by Thrift (2007: 12), the affective scheduling perspective endeavours to reintroduce ‘a note of wonder into a social science which, too often, assumes that it must explain everything’. This approach illuminates how the subtle oscillation between affective closeness and distance frequently evolves beneath conscious awareness, evading simple categorisation or reductive explanation.
Aligned with this perspective, this dynamic also demonstrates how keeping in touch is a more-than-human phenomenon, an ongoing entanglement of multiple bodies: mobile phones, friends, the Wi-Fi connection, work life and unstable infrastructure all unsettle the predetermined perceptions of keeping in touch in which the human, the social and the material are interwoven.
Lorimer’s (2005) idea of the more-than-representational is pertinent here. As he suggests, the more-than-representational angle affords a focus ‘on how life takes shape and gains expression in shared experiences, everyday routines, fleeting encounters, embodied movements, precognitive triggers, intuition, practical skills, affective intensities, enduring urges, unexceptional interactions and sensuous dispositions’ (Lorimer, 2005: 84). Within the prism of affect theory, keeping in touch manifests and materialises in discontinuous and fragmentary ways, intricately interlaced in more-than-human flows.
In their introduction to The Affect Theory Reader, Gregg and Seigworth (2010: 1) write that affect ‘is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension…’ As highlighted, affective scheduling opens a space for thinking differently about everyday connectivity, through semi-conscious and prelinguistic flows before they are named and represented as a codified emotion and a temporal trajectory for example.
Friendship is lived through ever-shifting, often unspoken currents of affective communication (Bissell, 2010b). This discomfort is not static; it circulates, transforms and assumes new configurations. A chance encounter with a friend, an overheard conversation, a meaningful glance or the faintest gesture – each weave into the fabric of this affective-temporal tapestry.
A focus on multisensory movements enables the dissolution of binary distinctions between regular and irregular friendship schedules, allowing for a more sophisticated exploration of how we navigate moments of closeness and distance, presence and disconnection. This analytical path exemplifies why employing a narrow line of inquiry to explore how often one meets, how long one communicates with others or the duration of specific ties in our lives along their discursive elaboration cannot capture the contingent nuances of scheduling time and keeping in touch. To give a straightforward example: think of an ongoing hesitation on reading a text message from a friend. Hesitation pervades and proliferates everyday scheduling. It can be felt as an intense rupture, an impulse or as an invisible and repetitive vibration. Hesitation, ambivalence, a momentary uncertainty can be understood as one of the vicissitudes of (not) keeping in touch, often going unremarked in daily life.
Another significant focus of affective scheduling lies in its non-anthropocentric perspective. Returning to the opening vignette at the beginning of this section, material factors such as intermittent Wi-Fi connectivity, auditory stimuli, limited parking availability and a distracted mood operate as an interwoven configuration of disruptions that challenge human centrality in keeping in touch, foregrounding connectivity as a contingent and distributed phenomenon shaped by infrastructural, environmental and cognitive interruptions.
In this light, affective scheduling opens fresh avenues to the socio-material entanglements of human and non-human actants (without separating them) – and as such, it implores us to think about scheduling as producing and as being produced by the affective material relationships between bodies herein troubling the subject–object, human/non-human divides. In short, scheduling is an affective experience whose ‘scope goes far beyond that of human subjectivity or the self’ (Navaro, 2012: 167).
In reimagining schedules beyond a human-focused lens, we recognise the agency of various actants, both human and non-human. Hesitation might be understood as a kind of small fracture or a visceral tension, within which various forces intersect: the ping of an incoming message, enduring the scorching heat of August, the blue stripes indicating that you’ve read the message (does your friend know?), scrolling through past conversations, and the barrage of automated work reminders concerning an urgent deadline.
Clearly, scheduling and keeping in touch are fabricated by digital technologies. Mobile phones and messaging technologies all form part of scheduling assemblages and cannot be regarded merely as a backdrop to human actions. These complex entanglements are exemplified by Kolehmainen (2022) in her work on teletherapies. Kolehmainen found that during the COVID-19 pandemic, digital technologies began to shape the co-constitution of therapeutic processes. As she documents, these ‘have become essential, everyday non-human companionships. They are intimate in the sense that they necessitate the conditions of human living, stressing the co-dependencies between human and non-human lives’ (Kolehmainen, 2022: 66).
As a conceptual framework, affective scheduling invites us to attune to these barely noticed vibratory motions, taking notice of the co-constitution of the material and affective flows of time. To follow on the work of Kolehmainen (2022), I propose that a human-centred ontology may assume that the phone and the messaging application serve as background for human relations. Yet, in this manner, it overlooks the lively entanglements of the human and the non-human in scheduling time. Differently put, an inquiry that adheres to human exceptionalism and primarily relies on human agency will miss the intricate flows of proximity and distance; these, in turn, vibrate and underscore how more-than-human intimacies are produced.
To illustrate: hesitation, stillness, waiting and the (non-)response to a close friend are deeply interwoven with various affective-material forces. This point helps us consider how keeping in touch is much more than what could be represented through language and narration. As an analytical perspective, affective schedules address these complexities, offering a more refined understanding of how affective bonds are cultivated, maintained and reimagined.
An additional implication of this argument is that the concept of affective scheduling offers a novel pathway to transcending the rigid frameworks of causality, encouraging a departure from traditional cause-and-effect reasoning. In line with Thrift’s (2008) assertion, it resists the compulsion to ‘explain everything’, and instead fosters a more nuanced, multilayered angle to understanding human and more-than-human experience.
Keeping in touch is conceptualised as an affective process that operates through sensory intensities, activating and circulating between different bodies and social contexts. Moments such as engaging in conversation, planning a meeting, experiencing shared quietness or feeling too depleted to reach out all demonstrate how keeping in touch operates beyond simple cause-and-effect reasoning, highlighting the deeply relational and visceral dimensions of connecting in everyday life.
To sum up this part of the article, scheduling – and by extension, keeping in touch – can be sensed as ‘an assemblage of disparate scenes’ (Stewart, 2007: 3) and an affective, multisensory experience, one that constantly shifts and changes in its intensities. It is actively created and activates inchoate affective waves of tension and release: the not yet conscious ‘something’, minor transition, without a clear source or trajectory: what Stewart (2008: 77) names as ontologies ‘immersed in the middle of things’.
As it spreads, keeping in touch unfolds in bursts, manifesting in and through the unacknowledged and blurred intervals occurring between and connecting all kinds of bodies. In striving to enhance the depth of this inquiry, I suggest that keeping in touch and scheduling time for friends and with friends entails the transmission of piecemeal, porous and evanescent forces, including thinking about friends.
Visceral Scheduling: Thinking about Friends
I am thinking about my friends, wondering what happened to one in particular. I am floating in my thoughts, which are proliferating in multiple directions. I lose my focus and now I am preoccupied with something else. I am wondering how my friend is these days. Much like ordinary affects (Stewart, 2007), my thoughts are diffused and rise slowly: the almost imperceptible yet nearly noticeable flows of time. Thinking about friends is woven into the affective fabric of my everyday experiences. I am teaching a graduate class that might interest a particular friend. I had intended to send her a text message but the urge to act fades away.
Sliding between human and non-human bodies, my thoughts skew in between words, spaces, moods and technologies. It is a movement of expansion and contraction, engagement and disengagement. This perspective resonates with Stewart’s (2007: 2) assertion that ordinary affects give everyday life ‘the quality of a continual motion of relations, scenes, contingencies, and emergencies’.
The theoretical exploration of affective scheduling invites a consideration of how it flows beyond the scope of conscious thought, resonating with visceral, disjointed moments of temporal and pre-subjective movements and connections. Keeping in touch, in this context becomes a subtle attunement, a barely perceptible moment outside the realm of cognitive recognition and human intentionality.
Thrift (2008: 7) approaches affect as a ‘roiling mass of nerve volleys [that] prepare the body for action in such a way that intentions or decisions are made before the conscious self is even aware of them’. Along similar lines, one could argue that focusing on what thinking about friends means and signifies is to gloss over its elusive, sensory and intangible elements. Thinking, in fact, can be described as a fluid affective exchange perpetually in flux, eluding and resistant to any conclusive formulation.
In this context, thinking emerges as an active, sensory process that is deeply embedded in relational interactions exceeding the constraints of linear reasoning and cause-and-effect chains, while surpassing representational temporal and spatial boundaries. Let us consider the unsent text more closely. The act of composing a message can be followed by an unanticipated pause – the moment when, despite the apparent intent to follow through, the message remains unsent. This seemingly trivial moment, often dismissed as a mere pause, denotes the fluid and amorphous nature of keeping in touch; unfolding as an affective process rather than being construed as a straightforward linear process.
Viewing this instance through the lens of affective scheduling highlights the fluctuation between focused attention and wandering thought, as well as between hesitation and forgetfulness. What may initially appear to be a simple choice – whether to send the message or not – can instead be understood as a field of intensities, each pulling in different directions. From this, it can be inferred that keeping in touch cannot be contained within the confines of binary thinking. In this sense, (un)sending the text can be understood as a complex interplay of lingering sensations, pauses and interruptions, moving in erratic and unpredictable trajectories.
Reflecting again on the example of thinking about a friend, one might suggest that by subverting deterministic cause-and-effect relations and linear accumulative frameworks, the process of scheduling time with and for friends challenges the notion of a linear orderly trajectory, wherein sensations follow a defined sequence. As Bissell (2010a: 83) writes, ‘thinking through affect . . . not only decentres the body from analysis but also liberates it from the notion of a singular, predictable and fixed trajectory’.
Feelings such as worry, uncertainty and caution activate vibratory forces that are contingent and erratic, not bound by linear progression but emerging as contingent processes, constantly netting and reconfiguring new assemblages of thought and action. These can be precognitive traces, that shape and stir thought in ways that are both elusive and compelling.
The idea of scheduling in motion affords new insights into the everyday processes of ‘doing’ time. Along these lines, one could suggest that sensing a thought with its wide variety of affects can be considered as an affective encounter that is always in the process of becoming. For instance, in its most ordinary form, thinking inherently carries the potential for disruption, for becoming something entirely different. By prioritising the often-unacknowledged affective movements of thought, this outlook diverts attention from visible actions to the affective undercurrents that shape friendship experiences. This standpoint helps to conceptualise scheduling time for friends as vital, open-ended processes and this is another reason why I refer to scheduling and not to schedules, emphasising once again what schedules do and not what they are.
Building upon the affective scheduling framework outlined earlier, the experience of thinking about friends does not fit neatly into linear or sequential temporal frameworks. Thinking about friends, in its affective richness, occurs outside such fixed temporalities; it emerges and spreads in a manner that is not easily traced through a single cause-and-effect chain. The key point here is that the process of thinking about friends defies structured schedules, instead revealing the contingency thinking about friends as an unpredictable and diffuse process. In addition to its diffuse nature, the diffusion of thoughts can also be described as disjointed and fragmented. Non-synchronous occurrences – such as disregarded instances or moments of ambiguity – may manifest as an intensity that resists capture, presenting a flux of sensations and impressions that evade articulation within a systematic and sequential conception of time.
Saturated with affect, the realm of thinking about friends calls for a heightened sensitivity to the changing intensities, requiring an attentiveness to the small, often unnoticed alterations in sensations when scheduling and feeling time. In the words of Stewart (2007: 2), this could be (an) ‘empty pause or a dragging undertone, a sensibility that snaps into place’.
In a way, and following Stewart, this is an affective state felt ‘in the air’, as a force that moves across bodies and spaces. Indeed, friends draw away and towards each other, become closer or more distant through unfolding dynamics and ever-changing sensory engagements.
In exploring this idea further, deploying the concept of affective scheduling gives new emphasis to how scheduling moves us in different ways. I sense my friends’ presence and absence in manifold and even capricious ways. Thoughts about someone or something may emerge randomly: while talking with a family member, while eating in a restaurant that serves food that the friend likes or from reading a book that reminds you of her. These affectively charged transmissions do not necessarily register within the realms of representational modes of social inquiries.
Thinking about friends, however, extends beyond the confines of human bodies following ‘impersonal flows of affects within assemblages of human and non-human elements’ (Fox, 2015: 305). The knock on the door, the fresh aroma of coffee, the external noises and the warmth of the weather all intertwine, connecting thoughts to sensory experiences of objects and sounds in a way that transcends our perceptions. Thoughts are connected to objects, places, human bodies, colours, smells and sounds. We sense, smell and hear our friends. The concept of affective scheduling invites a re-examination of thinking about friends as a confluence of fragmented visceral and material configurations, positioning it as a fluid and unpredictable process.
According to this view, these sensory experiences traverse a variety of elements in non-linear, fluctuating patterns, emerging from the intricate interplay of diverse, often subtle factors. These dimensions include, for example, beliefs about friendships, intertwined with the ambient presence of background music, work-related pressures and the perception of broader socio-political instability, all of which shape the flow of thinking as a complex affective experience.
As highlighted earlier, thinking about a friend can be difficult to pin down to a place and time. In this light, thinking is conceptualised as a synthesis of disjointed tangible affective forces, which emerge as a vibrant, erratic process, wherein sensory flows traverse between entities in non-linear and unpredictable configurations. For instance, we can consider thinking about friends as ‘slow creep’ (Bissell, 2014) intensities, creating an affective encounter that transcends temporal and spatial boundaries. As a matter of fact, thinking about a friend can be difficult to pin down to a place and time. In other words, the idea of scheduling as a fusion of fragmented visceral reactions enables us to view it as a dynamic and unpredictable process, wherein sensory experiences move across different entities in irregular and non-linear ways.
These factors encompass ideas, data, materials, objects, moods and undefined stimuli, all of which contribute to the complex flow of these affective experiences. In this way, thinking, keeping in touch and, by extension, scheduling is reflected upon as a more-than-human awareness, one that does not simply connect human bodies to one another. Thinking therefore can be regarded as a more-than-human process that emerges, evokes and impinges on different kinds of bodies, including non-human ones. This relational exchange amounts to a change in perspective, moving away from a human-centred view and challenging human exceptionalism, while encouraging a more-than-human ontology in the contemplation of keeping in touch. Foregrounding affective scheduling as a concept allows us to move away from anthropocentric understandings of human thoughts, and to extend thinking about friends beyond the personal and subjective domain.
To bring the thoughts discussed thus far together, keeping in touch and thinking about a friend can be seen as scheduling in motion, whereby connections are continually made. At the heart of affective scheduling as a conceptual framework, then, is an exploration of affective dimensions, which at times are hidden and unrecognised. Despite this, these movements are temporary, an aspect of a creeping rupture that gathers momentum; perhaps a friction that accumulates into what Bissell (2014) describes as movements building into potential tipping points. In this manner, as sociologists, we can further direct our scholarly inquiries into considering more closely the ebbs and flows of friendship ties. In a related vein, queries such as ‘how often do you meet your friend?’ or ‘tell me about special events in your friendship relationships’ gloss over such moments.
The same goes to assessing closeness and distance between friends. It is striking how a friend can be both present and absent, close and distant all at the same time. These entangled movements between bodies cannot be captured by sequential logic. These are difficult to categorise into temporal and socially recognisable labels, nor can they merely be encapsulated as representational and coded categories. Further, by highlighting the affective registers of scheduling time with friends, we can revisit and extend the ways in which we conceptualise the temporalities of friendship, incorporating more notions of contingency and materiality.
This is another avenue from which we can de-homogenise time-incorporating intensities, the different speeds and alterations that are not merely controlled by normative structures and tidy friendship narratives. By working with an affective toolbox and exceeding socio-temporal constructivism, my attempt here is to develop a new path for a sociology of affective schedules. Schedules are seen in terms of their potential for connection and interaction extending beyond the ontology of social structures, agentic subjects and the linear sequential modalities of time.
Conclusion
One aim of this study was to explore the analytical traction that can potentially be gained from applying theories of affect to the sociology of schedules. My first point of departure was not to explore what scheduling is, or how it is defined. Rather, I highlighted the importance of considering what scheduling does and what it can do, along with how it is lived and felt. In developing the concept of affective scheduling, I wanted to unpack the affective experience of scheduling, and from this perspective to pursue new avenues of inquiry in relation to the temporalities of lived time.
As I have argued, working with this conceptual filter can help renew the theorising of schedules, enriching our understandings of the ever-changing intensities along the myriad flows connecting and transmitted between the diverse kinds of bodies enmeshed in scheduling assemblages. In fact, the conceptual notion of affective scheduling and scheduling in motion offers us another rich starting point for thinking about the folds and flows of lived time along its multiple, relational and ephemeral movements. I further suggest that questions relating to how often we meet and communicate with friends, for example, or the (ideal) duration of a particular relationship, only capture part of the lived experience of scheduling. As illustrated throughout this article, scheduling emerges from the interaction with other bodies, provokes hidden movements and opens up new temporal sensibilities and ways of knowing.
By way of a quick conclusion, the affective schedules paradigm introduces an analytic focus to schedules and time studies in several ways. First, the force of affective scheduling as a conceptual groundwork inheres in its capacity to think beyond the temporal categorisation of time units such as the week and the month, or to rely on temporal representational thinking as well as on human-centred frameworks.
Second, the affective lens contests binary oppositions differentiating the regular and the irregular, the cognitive and the somatic, the human and non-human. Instead, it highlights intensities that move bodies and encounters in more than simply human-centric ways: pushing and pulling in different directions, enveloping and dissolving, merging in situated known and yet-to-be-known interactive contexts.
Third, scheduling as a dynamic and diffuse affective process may sit irretrievably in the less accessible dimensions of temporal awareness; herein, the conceptual filter of affective scheduling invites us to rethink the ever-evolving affective life in a way that highlights visceral modes of communication alongside their ever-changing relations of modification. As such, it also prompts sensitivity towards the in-between-ness (Gregg and Seigworth, 2010: 1) of movements, including their lapses, gaps and uncertain trajectories. Thus, when studying the temporalities of scheduling, we should also direct our attention to the ways in which scheduling directs and persistently produces temporal conglomeration. As I have noted, this temporal and affective variability cannot be accounted for solely by paying heed to how time is socially constructed, managed or represented by human agency. More attention needs to be paid to the moving matrix of scheduling time, along with its opaque qualities – difficult to explore and predict by relying solely on temporal categorisations.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
My heartfelt thanks go to Alice Bloch, Vanessa May and Chen Edelsburg for their intellectual engagement and thoughtful conversations, which enriched this work in many ways. I am especially grateful to Lihi Michael Perri, Shlomit Simhi and Akin Ajayi, for their attentive reading, invaluable editorial assistance and special support throughout this process. I also wish to express my deep appreciation to the editors of the journal and the anonymous reviewers of this article for their significant investment of time and their brilliant, profound and constructive comments.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
