Senses As Bodily Apparatuses of Generating and Perceiving Affects

This presentation aims to explore how the concept of senses can be employed in the sociological analysis of affects and affective practices. By “affect”, I refer to relational dynamics between human and nonhuman bodies (Slaby & von Scheve, 2019), which represents a more basic mode of affecting or being affected by the world, distinct from more cognitive affectivity phenomena such as moods, feelings, or emotions. However, this does not imply that affect is exclusively pre-discursive and non-intentional. Instead, I align with the argument (von Scheve, 2017) that affect can very well be experienced as a phenomenal feeling and further conceptualized into more cognitive emotional experiences like discrete emotions, while it may well remain a non-conceptual, implicit phenomenon. In terms of senses' conceptual alignment with affects, I argue that senses can be understood as bodily apparatuses for generating and perceiving affects. On the one hand, in cultural affect theory, affect is the term used to bracket “movement/sensation” and their unmediated connection (Massumi, 2002: 1), suggesting that affect caused by other bodies is sensed by human bodies and directly represented as fluctuations and changes in human sensations. On the other hand, extant sensory studies (e.g., Vannini et al., 2012; Howes & Classen, 2014; Sabido Ramos, 2023) have explored how senses and sensations organize practices through both hard-wired, pre-linguistic and symbolic, discursive aspects. This indicates that empirical investigation and analysis of sensory experiences can enable researchers to simultaneously analyze both the hard-wired, pre-reflective, indescribable aspect of affects, as well as their discursive, meaning-making, and socioculturally conceptualized components. I will illustrate this by using my digital ethnographic research on affective treatment ­– a sociocultural practice aimed at improving personal health and well-being by increasing positive feelings or alleviating unwell feelings via the establishment of specific forms of affective relationality and the modulation of affects.