Abstract
This article outlines the main tenets of affect theory and links these to Sloterdijk’s spherology. Where affect foregrounds prepersonal energies and posthuman impulses, spherology provides a lens for considering how humans congregate in constantly reconfiguring socialities in their pursuit of legitimacy and immunity. The article then explores the relevance of “affective spheres” for contemporary social science research. The article’s main argument here is that research of contemporary organisational and professional practices must increasingly be spherogenic, or seeking to build “affective spheres.” The basis of this argument are the in situ complexity and fast-changing nature of practices, and the increasing challenges involved in objectifying or ‘freezing’, and analysing or dissecting such practices. The article draws for its case study on a video-reflexive project conducted in a U.S. health service. The article concludes that the notion of research as spherogenics counterbalances the conventional methodological emphasis on a predetermined stance —whether neutral or political—in our construction and enactment of social science research.
Keywords
Introduction
The recent rise in scholarly interest in emotion (Hochschild, 1983) is now matched by a parallel rise of interest in affect (Ticineto-Clough, 2008). While these terms are defined in different ways by different authors, we take emotion to refer to the nameable dimensions of feeling (Damasio, 2003), and affect refers to feeling that largely remains prediscursive (Brennan, 2004; Massumi, 2002). This means that emotion refers to those impulses and sentiments with which I more or less consciously identify myself. Affect, by contrast, refers to impulses and sentiments that I have not (yet) recognised as having impact(ed) on me and acted through me.
The emotion/affect distinction serves a number of objectives. First, it acknowledges both the “internal” and the prepersonal nature of feeling, where the prepersonal refers to phenomena that, through moving me, may move you through means that are beyond both our control: near imperceptible body smells and movements, and hormonal and pheromonal phenomena (Brennan, 2004). Some of these energy flows may register as emotions; others may remain “in the background” or “behind the scenes” as unrecognised and often unfathomable influences on our bodies, conduct, and experience. Second, the rise in interest in affect resulted from the realisation that discursive and semiotic framing of our being-in-the-world has failed to do justice to a whole gamut of phenomena that “affect” us, but which remained unavailable or resistant to discursive-semiotic analysis; think of imitation and contagion which are so prominently present now in the viral spread of cultural phenomena. Third, affect theory injected our thinking about feeling and emotion with an ethical dimension. This occurred mainly through Deleuze’s revival of Spinoza’s view of affect as “enabling someone to act” (Spinoza, 2001). This emphasis on affect as a dynamic that positively or negatively impacts on people’s agency linked theory to an ethics of practice as a counterbalance to the objectification exacted by psychological and discursive constructs (Deleuze, 2005).
For Deleuze, as Seigworth and Gregg suggest, experience was not “to be deciphered or decoded or delineated but, rather, [had to] be nurtured” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 21). This explains why a great many theories of affect do not sweat the construction of any elaborate step-by-step methodology much at all, but rather come to fret the presentation of the style of presentation, the style of being present, more than anything else. (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 14)
Here, instead of privileging some analytical endpoint, the researcher-theorist questions “their own style of being present,” and with that, this style’s impact (or lack of it) on those at the centre of their interest. This latter questioning of positioning, of course, has critical implications for how we do research, for what it produces, and for how it affects our relationships with those whom we “subject” to research.
With this as initial background, this article now proceeds to outline the main implications of affect theory for social scientific research and research methodological practice. In doing so, the article first revisits the debate in science and technology studies about whether the position of the researcher is to be impartial or partisan. Questioning both these positionings, the article then offers a brief description of Peter Sloterdijk’s spherology (Sloterdijk, 1998, 1999, 2004) as a means for coming to terms with the affective dynamics of research as practice. Following on from the case study and its spherological analysis, the article concludes by outlining the potential of “affective sphere” to act as a principle for doing contemporary social science research.
Affect and/in Research
In his book After Method, John Law asks how we can “move away from the idea that research method is a technical (or moralising) set of procedures that need to be got right in a particular way” (Law, 2004, p. 143). He asks this question after concluding that research method does not offer “a more or less successful set of procedures for reporting on a given reality” but rather helps “to produce those realities.” Indeed, he regards research method as “craft[ing] arrangements and gatherings of things—and accounts of the arrangements of those things—that could have been otherwise.”
Several decades earlier, Howard Becker’s article “Whose Side Are We on” had already raised a similar question (Becker, 1967). While the article has elicited different interpretations (Hammersley, 2001), Becker argues that impartiality and objectivity are near enough impossible due to the “unavoidable sympathies” that entwine the researcher. Becker saw the task of the social scientist therefore to limit the effects of such sympathies: “Our problem is to make sure that, whatever point of view we take, our research meets the standard of good scientific work [and] that our unavoidable sympathies do not render our results invalid” (Becker, 1967, p. 246).
The risk here is that the researcher might be “captured by one set of participants” at the expense of others (Miettinen, 2004, p. 107), resulting in claims that may be political and partisan more so than observable. It is on this basis that Collins charged interventionist research with the fallacy of “a commitment to commitment” (Collins, 1996), instead advocating for “methodological neutralism.” But for Collins, as Miettinen states, neutralism does not rule out commitment to a cause per se. It accepts “commitment [as] the result of research rather than its starting point” (Miettinen, 2004, p. 108).
Yet irrespective of whether the origin and aim of a researcher’s commitment are political or neutral, neither stance acknowledges “the hinterland of realities” (Law, 2004, p. 143) which research method serves to filter out. In effect, research method per se serves to displace the “multiple or the fractional, the elusive, the vague, the partial and the fluid [into] Otherness” (Law, 2004, p. 137). On this view, political commitment and methodological neutralism share a calculated response, ruling out “messiness.” In both cases, research method ensures “mess” gives way to that which can be made to appear “independent, prior, single and determinate” (Law, 2004, p. 137).
Peter Sloterdijk’s “spherology” by contrast offers a means for giving shape to these messy in situ dynamics. Spherology conceptualises the spatial and affective dynamics of human coexistence, and in that sense makes possible accounts of how the in situ practice of research comes to overtake researchers’ commitment to political stances and scientific ideals. In effect, spherology portrays the multiplicity and instability of habits, identities, and practices that are so characteristic of our contemporary social lives (Borch, 2009; Sloterdijk, 1998, 1999, 2004). Sloterdijk describes spheres as increasingly short-term and fluid spatio-temporal effects involving configurations of people, symbolic systems, and material resources. Summarising Sloterdijk’s spherology, and echoing Bauman’s description of “liquid modernity” (Bauman, 2000), Thrift refers to spheres as “constantly multiplying collectives” (Thrift, 2008, p. 252). Spheres further do not have “a single logic” as unifying principle, as their basis is spatio-affective. They should therefore not be thought of as in the first instance discursive or semiotic practices, but as situational and circumstantial dynamics. Their fluidity means that humans are constantly needing to exceed themselves, adapting themselves to newly emerging worlds, and leaving behind familiar ways and places of being and doing (Sloterdijk, 2013).
Amidst this ongoing upheaval, spheres nevertheless afford a modicum of connection. Connection bears health-generative effects: it bestows both energy and immunity (Christakis & Fowler, 2009). Put differently, spheres arise from resonances that move people to act together. In what follows, we describe one research event where a moment of resonance had an unexpected spherological, or indeed, spherogenic, effect.
Being Moved to Act – The Neonatal Intensive Care Unit
In this section of the article we describe how a researcher and a number of research participants rallied around one specific issue. From the outset, the researcher’s approach was to use video to “capture” aspects of practice. The intent was to show the resulting footage back to participants, and enable them to talk about and reflect on what went on, question it, and perhaps reconfigure it as a result of having come to terms with the work in new ways (Iedema, Mesman, & Carroll, 2013). The case study is taken from Carroll’s (2014) recent work on breast milk donation in neonatal intensive care units.
I used the method “video reflexive ethnography” to help me understand and engage with how donor human milk was being utilised in American and Australian neonatal intensive care units (NICU). In particular, I focused on how donor milk was positioned relative to other types of infant feeding such as a mother’s own milk and artificial formula in the broader context where donor milk is now recognised as a better food compared to formula when a mother’s own milk is unavailable (American Academy of Pediatrics, 2012). In one particular American NICU I stood alongside doctors, nurses, dieticians and social workers at ward rounds and ethnographically video-ed the everyday practice of doctors making decisions about what, how much, and how often each infant in the NICU would be fed. It was clear that breastmilk feedings, using a mother’s own milk or donor milk, were a high priority for the clinicians in this particular NICU. This was evident from the policy of the NICU which was to provide 360 mls of donor milk at no cost to parents when the mother’s own milk was unavailable, after which time parents were required to pay at the cost of USD$3.50/30 mls. However it was not until encountering one mother–infant pair during “field work” that this policy revealed itself to be problematic for achieving the institution’s aims of encouraging exclusive breastmilk feedings for very preterm infants. When encountering this problem and how it affected a particular mother–infant pair, I was “moved to act” through identifying the topic for the video-reflexive intervention with that particular NICU. The mother involved was a young mother who was living in difficult social circumstances. After an unplanned pregnancy, she had given birth to a premature baby who arrived 15 weeks before its due date. The mother was not producing sufficient volumes of breastmilk to feed her severely ill baby. The prescribing neonatologist stated she was reluctant to prescribe formula for this baby because he was so weak, so prone to infection, and likely to contract the disease necrotising enterocolitis (NEC) that is associated with formula feeding, and which is largely preventable through a diet of exclusively human milk. The issue confronting the clinical team, the prescribing neonatologist, the mother and the infant during the ward round was that despite the baby’s need for human milk, the NICU (according to its own policy) had arrived at the upper limit of the hospital-sponsored donor human milk available to feed the baby. The infant’s mother could not pay for the infant’s donor milk. She could not even afford to buy her own lunch, let alone pay for the medical costs associated with her infant’s hospital admission, including the additional donor milk she now needed to feed her baby an exclusively human milk diet. I witnessed, and then recorded on video, the NICU clinical staff desperately trying to work around the situation. They had first tried to delay the introduction of formula; they then discussed mixing formula with human milk, and alternating formula feeds with human milk feedings, all as solutions to lessen the impact of formula on this extremely premature and sick infant. As I watched the staff trying to maximise the scarce resource of donor breastmilk and the last few millilitres of the mother’s own breastmilk, I, the videographer and researcher, became affected by the situation and suddenly felt “moved to act.” It became apparent to me that placing a limit on the availability of hospital-sponsored donor milk and charging parents for any additional use of donor breastmilk ran counter to clinicians’ espoused values and medical preferences, but this dilemma remained invisible to them and “taken as given.” My first response to the situation was to offer my own credit card to the nurse manager to anonymously deduct the cost of the donor milk for this baby from my account. The nurse manager refused, probably seeing it as inappropriate. Upon reflection I realised that the difficulty faced by the neonatal clinicians, the family and the infant was not limited to this one case. Rather it would have occurred in other cases of premature infants who had been in the exact same situation, and would continue to occur if the policies of the hospital did not change. I again decided to act, but this time using the video footage to see what the clinicians themselves would say were they to see themselves acting within and facing the consequences of this dilemma. In preparation, I edited a short clip portraying the case and associated clinical discussions, and then showed it to the medical staff and clinical team. In addition to the video clip, I also presented cost analysis data on feeding infants donor milk (Carroll & Herrmann, 2013). As the clinicians watched the footage of the prescribing doctor dealing with the mother and the sick baby, they witnessed the contradiction between their espoused values (care for people, prescribe donor breast milk), their donor milk policies, and their in situ actions. What they saw went against “the organisation that they wanted to be.”
In the above account, the researcher recounts how she happens to become embroiled in a specific issue. She was not able to claim that she had planned to embark on this particular course of action. She was entrained by witnessing an interaction between a clinical team and a mother of a neonate baby. She became concerned about the difficult position faced by frontline neonatologists and the well-being of a specific neonate, offering to pay for extra milk herself. The nurse manager, perhaps as a result of it being a transgression beyond the conventional researcher role, refused the offer.
Moving beyond the individual to later reflect on the case as an organisational policy issue, the researcher was so moved that she pursued the issue by showing the relevant footage of the doctor–mother interaction to members of the clinical team. From that moment on, the issue took on a life of its own: Following the video reflexive session, the NICU team decided to lobby hospital administration to provide further funding so that all infants in NICU would receive unlimited amounts of donor milk in cases where the mother could not produce sufficient volumes of her own milk. Fortunately this change in policy was deemed to be both equitable and cost-effective, and was implemented within three months of the video reflexive session.
Elsewhere we have written about the affective effect of practitioners watching video footage of their own practices (Iedema et al., 2013). Far from having a simply technical impact on how practitioners understand their work practices, here we show that reflexive video entwines the researcher and the researched in a complex relationship that underscores both parties’ vulnerability (Carroll, 2009).
My startling realisation was that the risk I had taken in confronting the clinicians with their own unquestioned assumptions and problematic decisions led to a far-reaching response. Being embroiled in the flows of in situ practice, the clinicians had not previously had or taken the time to think about the implications for both frontline neonatologists and neonates of insufficient funding for the required volumes of hospital-funded donor breast milk. The sensitivities and contradictions associated with the current donor milk policy were revealed to the clinical team as they viewed the video-recording of their clinical practices on screen. Instead of challenging me for attending to these difficulties, the reflexive discussion that followed connected the neonatal team with the current donor milk policy, their prescribing and decision-making practices, and the economy of donated breastmilk allocation. Watching themselves on video, they “saw” how their own conduct contravened their espoused logic: that an exclusive human milk diet was not only important for the values held by the organisation, but that by allocating extra donor milk to ensure an exclusively human milk diet, NEC could be prevented. Thus the increased cost of providing higher volumes of donor milk to vulnerable infants in the NICU would be balanced through the savings achieved through NEC prevention.
The Researcher’s “Style of Being Present”
When Howard Becker and colleagues commented several decades ago that sociological analysis “necessarily deflates people’s view of themselves and their organizations” (Becker, Geer, Hughes, & Strauss, 1964, p. 273), they saw the remit of such analysis to encompass both “a detailed description of informal behavior [and] an abstract discussion of theoretical categories.” But if the effect of sociological analysis is to frame “something precious as an instance of a class,” the intent of video reflexive ethnography is to produce a quite different effect altogether. Rather than framing research participants’ “precious” activity as an instance of a class predetermined by the sociological discourse of the researcher, video reflexive ethnography represents activity as a complex in situ dynamic. This makes it possible for activity to be apprehended “from under a different aspect” (Iedema et al., 2009; Wittgenstein, 1953).
Apprehending our conduct “from under a different aspect” becomes possible thanks to the camera (through the researcher) adopting an unusual angle on and unfamiliar distance from taken-as-given events as they unfold. The effects of such alternative angle and distance are not at all at a par with the effects of reframing what people are and do in abstract sociological discourse. Vision invites an alternative positioning, a different way of seeing, whereas abstracting “something precious” into a sociological class is a mode of accounting for practice whose principal reference point is a knowledge from whose logic and operations research participants tend to remain excluded. Presenting video footage of what people do back to them is therefore quite unlike framing conduct in sociological terms. Consider how Carroll describes the NICU professionals’ response to her video intervention: Three months later, when I returned to interview the medical director of the NICU, I asked how he believed this change had occurred. The director told me that, in his opinion there were two aspects underlying the policy change. The first was the power of the video. He stated that seeing the neonatologist in featured in the video struggle to prescribe sub-standard care, and the mother and infant who could not afford best care was not ethical and not the organisation they wanted to be: “The video was the most powerful and the most impressive aspect because of her enthusiasm in conveying the importance of breast milk and then the next step saying, ‘well we have to pay now.’ Having an image and a voice is a hundred thousand times more powerful than messages.” (NICU Director) The second aspect he identified as assisting the change in practice was that the researcher approached the problem “with both a head and a heart.” “When inducing change in an area, the person who delivers an important message needs to have credibility. What you provided us was not only the mind but the heart. The leader is the person who has the ability to provide both parts.” (NICU Director)
The director is clear about the power of vision: it is “a hundred thousand times more powerful than messages.” Yet video research renders the researcher highly vulnerable. She presents not authoritative knowledge (“messages”), but a way of seeing aspects of practice which practitioners tend to take or project as normal and natural. Doing so may place the researcher in a delicate position. Research participants may challenge the representativeness of what is video-ed for their practice as a whole, or they may question the researcher’s right to visualise aspects of conduct that are considered private and unavailable for public viewing (Carroll, Iedema, & Kerridge, 2008). Aside from these kinds of dismissals, research participants may also experience video feedback as de-naturalising and de-normalising their taken-as-given ways of being and acting in the world, as happened in the case study described before. Here, video served to “open up a space of transformation” (Massumi, 2002).
For the researcher, and largely due to the unpredictability of participants’ responses, video feedback harbours numerous uncertainties (Carroll, 2009). These uncertainties go well beyond questions about what can or should be video-ed. They also include questions like, what can or should be shown back? How will people respond? Will anything positive emerge from this process? On all these fronts, and due to the immediacy and accessibility of vision, video reflexive research invites the researcher to “fret the style of presentation, the style of being present, more than anything else” (Seigworth & Gregg, 2010, p. 14). The style of presentation pertains not to how matters should be framed in discourse, but to the dynamics of researcher–researched relationships.
Indeed, the nature and quality of the footage produced through video reflexive research are direct effects of the researcher’s “style of being present.” In contrast to method which is per definition situation-independent, neutral and iterative, style refers to the researcher’s unique, individual enactment of the situations and relationships with which she is confronted. Method subordinates the researcher’s style to a predetermined plan, whereas style subordinates method to the affordances (the messiness?) of situations and relationships. A critical aspect of the style in question here is sensitivity to moments when “the research participants and the researcher are together moved to act.” Here the researcher articulates her style of using video reflexive ethnography with clinicians: During fieldwork, I am open to being affected. I wait to be affected. When I am affected I am moved to pursue certain directions in my research, analysis, and intervention (Behar, 1996). With copious moments of everyday clinical work captured on video, as a researcher I need to decide what footage to include for the collaborative reviewing with clinicians. The issues associated with donor milk are many, and are each explored in collaboration with staff in the NICU during fieldwork encounters and during interviews. Clinicians will deliberately point out aspects of clinical practice that should be celebrated, or improved. Sometimes these issues will overlap with the focus of my own research interests. However, despite the subsequent narrowing of possibilities for video reflexivity, there still remains a choice to be made. Feeling, identifying and utilising the momentum that is harnessed when the NICU team and the researcher are together “moved to act” is a critical component of engaging in video reflexive ethnography.
Research as Spherogenic Dynamic
Seen through the lens of Sloterdijk’s theory, “being together moved to act” is a spherogenic event.
The change in this NICU was a result of many individuals coming together and being affected by a single event: my witnessing, being able to record and show back to NICU staff a 3 minute interaction between a doctor and a neonate’s mother.
Construed as spherogenic dynamic, research is not in the first instance about knowledge production, but about relationship enactment. Instead of inquiring into what can be known and what can be conveyed as true, this modality of research asks what kinds of relationships are possible and whether they are open or closed to being entered into by others. The method, video reflexive ethnography in this case, takes the role of an enabler of relational dynamics, rather than of a guarantor of prespecified kinds of outcomes—practical solutions, portable knowledge, and the like.
The essence of the spherogenic dynamic described before is the researcher’s ability and willingness to engage participants in discussions about matters that happen to come to matter. For a long time, the relationship between the researcher and their subjects has been construed as a paradox of professional distance and personal involvement (Agar, 1980). Such a paradox however arises from the assumption that the professional and the personal are in competition with one another. By contrast, a spherogenic perspective on research takes the conflation of the professional and the personal as its starting point. Indeed, and in line with Lefebvre’s “rhythmanalysis” (Lefebvre, 2004), spherogenic research regards such conflation of the professional and the personal as the condition of possibility for the researcher and the researched to begin to agree on matters that matter: The rhythmanalyst calls on all their senses. They draw on their breathing, the circulation of their blood, the beatings of their heart and the delivery of their speech as landmarks.… They think with their body, not in the abstract, but in lived temporality.… They garb themselves in the tissue of the lived, of the everyday. But the difficulties never cease for them. Being behind the interactions, the intertwinings of rhythms, the effort to discern and note this or that one imposes itself perpetually.… They must simultaneously catch a rhythm and perceive it within the whole, in the same way as non-analysts, people, perceive it. They must arrive at the concrete, through experience. (Lefebvre, 2004, p. 31)
Lefebvre’s “rhythmanalysis” relies on a being-with that affords sensitivity to how processes unfold, to what stakes people have in processes, to how they position themselves, and how they judge things and people. The researcher-rhythmanalyst acts on the extent to which participants allow the researcher in to listen to their practices, and enter into dialogue with them about those practices using their language and representations (stories, footage, or whatever). To pursue Lefebvre’s metaphor, a rhythm needs to mark the researcher–researched relation before research can be said to have taken place. Put differently, the rhythm colocates the researcher and the researched in a sphere that is marked by that rhythm. The rhythm becomes the basis and medium of change, and change, in turn, becomes the point of departure for the researcher’s knowledge and account; here, the NICU’s adoption of a different policy with regard to donated breastmilk allocation.
In Carroll’s case, then, and aside from an enabling array of research methodological resources, researching is becoming entrained by the dynamics and rhythmics of social-organisational practices, events, and relations. Such a stance becomes possible and practical when our disciplinary vocabulary and assumed expert legitimacy remain subordinate to the rhythmicality of practice and spherogenic potential of the relationships. It should be clear that this is a long way from the inflexibilities of political “commitment to commitment” and the rigours of methodological neutrality. If the spherogenic dynamics of research are not just seen as “unavoidable sympathies” needing to be compensated for in the future, but credited as the very precondition for researchers and researched to be enabled to coarticulate and pursue matters of concern (Latour, 2004), we will have responded constructively to Law’s (2014) call for greater attention to the fractional dimensions of social research.
Conclusion
This article’s main argument has been that research of contemporary social, organisational, and professional practices requires participating in, affecting, and building of “affective spheres.” We suggested this is important due to the in situ complexity and fast-changing nature of practices, and the increasing challenges involved in objectifying or “freezing,” and analysing or dissecting such practices using technological expertises. The article drew on a case study from a video-reflexive project conducted in a health setting to illustrate the spherogenic potential of social research.
We now propose to distil the previous exposition into the following principle. A spherogenic perspective does more than underscore the fractional aspects of research by shining a light on the “hinterland of reality” that method tends to filter out. Spherogenic research relocates our methodological emphasis from the conventional aims of description and analysis towards the dynamics of in situ research relationships. If the paradox of professional distance and personal involvement was still anchored to the presumption that the researcher needed to be persuaded of something being true, spherogenics posits that research involves (among other things) researchers and researched agreeing that specific matters matter sufficiently for them to warrant action. On this view, spherogenic research springs from the dynamics and rhythms that arise among researchers and researched, and that form the basis for our understanding and appreciation of local practice.