Introduction
One of the most difficult things we face as researchers is to put aside our conditioned assumptions about the subject(s) of our research and begin to engage with fresh eyes and appreciation. Can we see beyond the immediate encounter and if so how can we understand the ‘more-than’ that may not be obvious while collecting data or determining meaning. The processual acts of discovering the more-than aspects of an engagement with ‘other’, are rooted in the body and its durational and indelible connection with cognition. In this chapter, I use the development of my own poststructural methodology as a means to inspire emerging academics to re-think conventional methods and methodologies and embrace the value of embodied knowing. I suggest a line of feeling, thinking and doing that calls the researcher to be present to their own bodily sensations and feelings so they can build an understanding of the rich contextual knowledge pertinent to the subject of enquiry.
The Evolution of My Affective Methodology
I currently use my knowledge and experience of affect, becoming and duration as a means to conceptualise my approach to research, however I first came across these concepts through a sustained practical and theoretical engagement with art and art pedagogy. My appreciation and understanding of art and its expressive qualities has led me to develop a deep respect for the human body’s capacity for acknowledging affect both in terms of what is received and transmitted. Relying on feelings to understand what, why and how something might exist and what it might mean within a conceptual framework became integral to my art making, art pedagogy and ultimately my academic research practice. Within the context of engaging with art and teaching art, my body was often awakened to sensations and feelings that prompted conceptual thinking. This process combines perception, affection and cognition to understand the body’s response to an encounter with art. It provides a way of experiencing not only what art can be but also what art can do.
Although I argue that the body-mind relationship needs to be at the core of art education, many other professions also place the human body at the forefront of engagement and derive meaning and understanding from the body’s experiences. For health practitioners, social workers, counsellors and sports people, among many others, the feeling body is often implicated in their professional and vocational lives. Within these practices the affective body and the recognition of its emotive sensibility helps to promote connections and maintain respect, compassion and integrity towards the other (student, client, participant or stakeholder) and the self. The ways in which I navigated the sensual world of art making and art pedagogy, prior to becoming an academic writer, has influenced how I navigate the physical, philosophical and conceptual world of educational research. In maintaining an openness while listening, observing, translating and communicating, I consciously welcome new and novel material and its potential for intellectual arousal, affective stimulus, contemplation and interpretation. What was an intuitive and creative body-mind process for me within the course of my art practice and teaching career has now developed into an affective methodology that drives my research inquiries. Affective processes inspire and initiate extraordinary acts of inquiry on the one hand, and recognition, responsibility and understanding of self on the other.
Methodologies that acknowledge the transmitting and receiving affective body and its instincts, intuitions and tendencies as integral to the research process are supportive of an empathic understanding of the “other”. This occurs through the articulation of felt feelings and their cognitive and conceptual associations when experiencing an encounter with something not yet fully understood; an encounter rather than a recognition. Before decisions are finalised, an “embodiment process” needs to take place, whereby body-mind interactions stimulate a desire for more contextual evidence, creating more adequate ideas. This process works to locate the not-yet-understood within its own context, culture, environment and history. Incorrect assumptions can be allayed and fresh perceptions and cognitions can be experienced and understood. Through these means we can account for and accept that which is unfamiliar and different.
I became aware of this embodied learning process and its benefit to learning while engaging in art critiques at art school. The art critique is fundamental to art pedagogy because it not only highlights affect relations; it can also enhance an individual’s personal responsive mechanisms to art. Within a group, students critique each other’s artwork in turn, in a process where feelings, ideas and concepts relevant to each work are shared. The ideas that emerge from the experience are often argued or contested but nevertheless mulled over in a manner that over time gives them import and consideration. This collective engagement and sharing plunges each individual body into the art encounter with renewed affective and conceptual relevance as each student voices their personal perspectives in turn. Eventually this process culminates in fleshing out an expanded contextual understanding and appreciation of the work in question.
The Art Critique
The art critique begins — I hold my breath as I feel the sensations pertaining to the artwork somewhere deep inside my body. These feelings become sensorial understandings that are not yet articulated through language but feelings that are intimately palpable and beckoning me towards an instinctual and intuitive interpretation. I try and allay the small waves of anxiety welling within me in anticipation of what to voice about the artwork in question. Affect, transmitting from the artwork and received through my intelligent body, is making itself understood as my thinking grapples with this affective experience. I do not want anyone to speak, not just yet; I want to hold all of the possible readings regarding this artwork at bay until I too can define the territory it fires within me. I am held within its embrace and enjoying the nuanced meaning I am making of it as affect relations gently seed into my thoughts.
After some time, I encourage the students to speak first which may give them agency within the task of reading the artwork. This allows them to express the things they are interested in as they think and feel the artwork they face. Their reading of the artwork may allude to their individual tendencies with regard to their affect relations and affective understanding. These first tentative steps in voicing opinion are important as they will lead to more complex ideas. The scope and impact of the students’ reading of the work is somewhat dependent on their familiarity with their feeling body, the quality and nuance of vocabulary and their confidence in regard to voicing their opinions. The students begin with description, but very quickly move beyond the immediate physicality of the work and enter into what the work, or aspects thereof, conjure for them. Opinions, feelings and judgements that can cohere or differ are offered into the mix. Comments, ideas and uncertainties are then collectively developed to become alternative viewpoints through which the work can be re-experienced; re-appreciated. The discussion is lively and the student-artist whose work is being critiqued is frantically taking notes so as to capture the gems that are released from engaged minds. By now the discussion has moved toward more conceptual concerns and is punctuated by rich and philosophical readings of the artwork. The critique group becomes an affective body whereby our collective comments dovetail and enrich each other’s understanding as the discussion deepens. Ideas, concepts and corporeal understanding are woven together.
As the lecturer, I acknowledge that all comments are worthy and talk about how they contribute towards discovering different ways of encountering the artwork. All comments help to provide a greater context for the reading of the work and collectively move our initial, perhaps simple ideas, toward becoming more complex ideas. When the discussion slows and the critique group moves on to another artwork, I retract my thoughts (and feelings) in preparation for the next affective experience. However, before I do this, I am mindful of the enrichment process. I reflect on how much I have just learned not only about the artwork in question but also about the individuals who have offered their feelings, insights and opinions as they disclosed to some degree their tendencies and paradigmatic thinking. Albeit sometimes fairly vaguely. I feel as if I know them better as a result of understanding the voicing of their experiences within the process of critique. It is in welcoming their words and ideas that my own critical thinking processes are enriched. A kind of synergy is forming between me and them, them and me – not to mention the kind of connection that is growing between themselves. I value how the art critique brings with it new knowledge, articulation of felt feelings and critical friends.
The participants in an art critique play two distinct roles. They forge their own ideas through recognising the affect relations at play and practice articulating the concepts that grow out of those relations as they merge with cognition. They also consider the ideas and concepts being articulated from their fellow students and test the integrity of these other ideas with their own sensibility and understanding.
Participants within a research context are also given a voice, and in response the embodied researcher can open themselves to the nuances of the affective relations occurring throughout the research process. An engagement as such can elicit a more-than understanding within the exchange and the researcher can listen and observe affectively for pertinent contextual material. Throughout an art critique, students are intent on affectively and cognitively understanding the relations they are forming with the artwork in question. They are searching for ways to express their feelings that can move them beyond a sense of liking or not liking. They begin to see and experience the context for their perceptual acumen. Each student views the artwork through their particular personal, cultural, political and philosophical lens. Each viewpoint adds to a variety of articulations that together provide a robust sense of what the artwork can do. How does it feel? And what might this mean?
Responsive comments and readings of the work are made within the context of other comments/readings. The seductive and convincing articulation of the effect of the artwork’s affect by one individual can be absorbed and considered by other individuals, assimilated or ignored. The understanding that begins to form about an artwork’s affective capacity enables further discussion about what those capacities might mean; what conceptual territory they may be referring to. This sharing of affect relations culminates in ideas and concepts and helps students to build an understanding of art and of each other. This appreciative knowledge of each other occurs through the disclosure of diverse viewpoints rather than sameness. The intent listening and sharing builds contextual knowledge and helps the students to transform their initial “inadequate ideas” about an artwork into “more adequate ideas” (Spinoza 1996, p. 52). The art critique introduces students to different perspectives as well as the role these perspectives play in understanding a more complex contextual reading of the artwork. This often results in the students being open to their fellow students’ opinions and respecting the ensuing discussion, particularly when it references pertinent conceptual translations of their own artwork. In this way the individual artist/student is given alternative ways to understand the thing of their making; alternative ways in which to develop the obvious as well as the more obscure or abstract ideas therein.
When we are learning about art we need to understand both the cause and the effect of the expressive qualities within the work. We need to appreciate the visual language at play and all of it nuances. Every element of an artwork will add to its reading and become part of the language being conveyed or transmitted and therefore perceived and received by the viewer as a feeling-thinking experience. This experience feeds an affective relational exchange between the work and the viewer which is continually becoming; continually being created a new or modified. The more we engage with the work in question the more we are building our repertoire of feelings about each expressive element or detail as well as the whole assemblage; its narrative, power and aesthetic.
When an encounter of an artwork is a shared experience and the felt impressions and ideas gained through being with that work are articulated, a greater contextual knowing is brought into focus. New feelings about the work can be ignited through sharing affective and cognitive insights and as a result new recognition and articulation of both feelings and ideas will develop. For the artist-student the cause and effect discussion may become very important as a means to understand their own art practice from a broader perspective. They can be more objective as they learn to see through others’ eyes the elements that have a capacity to assert an intention and realise ideas regardless of their original assumption of their own work or their intentions. The aim of the art critique within an educational setting is to practice the skills pertaining to perception, affection and cognition while appreciating and valuing the perspective of the other.
When we first encounter a work of art, we cannot make sense of the fullness of its expression until we have processed our feelings and thoughts about it, and negotiated the broader contextual territory—not only of its making or origin but also its currency; its capabilities and capacity to drive an affective experience. We need to meet it on its own terms before levelling judgment upon its value. When we approach art with suitable respect, we understand that in due course the ‘unknown’ will become more familiar as we sense and think its ability and its meaningfulness. This includes using our body-mind intelligence to form relations with as many elements/aspects as possible so as to appreciate the work and its capacity. To begin looking at an artwork with a question that requires our cognition only, will impinge on our ability to create and acknowledge the affect relations at play. In other words, this approach of wanting to know rather than appreciating how it feels denies the fullness of what art is capable of doing. Once we have embodied the transmitted affect our feelings will help decipher its conceptual relevance. We can only form questions about the work once we have understood what it is capable of; what it can do and why that particular doing is relevant to our receiving of it. We must then live in the company of uncertainty as we forge affective relations within the pursuit of meaning and ponder the inherent possibilities that are being presented.
Within the art school studio context, the art critique is one of many events where each individual has an opportunity to question their opinion and habitual responses in regard to what they perceive. They are prompted to examine their tendencies so as to embrace new conceptual awareness and begin the process of thinking differently. Art educational events as such provide a way for students to challenge their view of the world and simultaneously explore how they identify with that world—who they are becoming in the face of such exploration and challenges. Through these means, art students learn to validate, moderate or discard ‘wobbly’ opinions about art and its impact as new critical contextual information and understanding is revealed and tested. This can allow for new frames of reference to be realised experientially and cognitively. This regime of change and renewal is set in motion through the ongoing affective and cognitive relations that are created between our ever-changing environment and our ongoing maturation of attitudes and values; our view of the world. It is these shifts in acknowledgement and understanding that are always and already becoming the processual acts of individuation within us as human beings.
Early one Autumn morning I found myself mindlessly tidying up the dead leaves that had begun to fall from the deciduous tree shading our driveway. My mind was far away as my body carried out this seasonal task. On returning to the back door I was met by my partner who was gasping as if her voice had suddenly left her and frantically pointing to the collarbone region of my body. I knew by her panic that something untoward was resting on the white towelling of my dressing gown. Panicking, I brushed the menacing insect to the ground. A quick glance at its body slowly retreating transferred its “wētā-ness”1 into my psyche and I screamed in a bid to extract the fear from my own petrified body. I knew that during the previous second the wētā and I had touched each other in what I understood as an affective relational kind of way. I was not amused or comforted by this union, and the image of the fallen wētā stayed with me for a very a long time. To this day I can still sense its scratchy touch upon my skin.
A few days later I was in the local supermarket using a customer shopping basket for a few needed groceries. I stopped in the fridge section and to free up both hands I placed the basket on the floor. I heard a rustling sound coming from the basket – the wētā had returned. I screamed as I jumped away from the menace, only to realise that the rustling sound had been made by my paper-thin shopping list shifting as the basket settled on the floor. The other shoppers had stopped and were staring. I sheepishly retrieved the scrap piece of paper masquerading as the wētā. I smiled and made some inane apologetic gesture and carried on with my shopping. Slowly I understood that my ‘cry’ had indeed created what Deleuze and Guattari (2004) would call an ‘assemblage’, as the wētā, the basket, unknown shoppers and myself were all implicated in the event; we were brought together within that particular and poignant moment.
My “wētā” experience in the supermarket was so profound that I could feel an assemblage in the making. My audible scream and visible bodily response served to rupture the otherwise ordinary milieu of the shopping aisle, forcing a resetting of relations within the immediate field. Affect relations were palpable and thoughts silently mouthed. With the quickening of sensation, thresholds diminished and I succumbed to the process, enriched through philosophical understanding. This indulgence, however, dissolved into normalcy as quickly as it had begun. But to be physically experiencing the very abstract concept that had been mulling over in my mind felt both strange and exciting—it was Spinoza’s (1996) ‘parallelism’ at work. The body and the mind working simultaneously to understand—feeding information between them so as to form new and novel knowledge. Perhaps these concepts and their physical expression are always and already synapsing just beyond our ability to perceive. Perhaps all we need is to tune into how our body tells us what is happening. Having the philosophical language to think about these concepts and the ability to discuss their reach and impact provides us with the ability to conceptually locate embodied experiences and to feel the abstract concept at play.
Within an art practice, the utilisation of affective responses and their associated thoughts and ideas becomes habitual. This process functions as method within the developmental and processual stages of both making art and engaging with art. To do either of these things successfully the artist must self-reflect on what the work is doing and apply critiquing strategies to this engagement. When we are aware of our affective body informing our curiosity, we become conscious of how we are using what I call our intelligent body to make meaning. With practice and familiarity, and by acknowledging the felt feelings and affections that course through the body, we can learn to identify and understand them. When our intelligent body is sensitive to the nuanced nudges of our affective body, our ability to map and contextualise the immediate environment/object/subject is enhanced. We are then able to draw upon our intuitive understanding that is manifested through affect relations, memory and duration. At the same time, we can also be mindful of personalised tendencies, instincts and impulses that inform our thinking but can also drive outcomes towards particular habitual results. Therefore, when using the body and its natural and learned response mechanisms as research methods we need to be aware of the benefits and the possible pitfalls. As we practice a more affective and relevant approach to research, we discover that the skills gained can invite significant experiences that inform and shape the processual acts of individuation—our subjectivity.
Affective Methodologies: Approach and Philosophical Lens
The existence of which we are most assured and which we know best is unquestionably our own, for of every other object we have notions which may be considered external and superficial, whereas, of ourselves, our perception is internal and profound.
Individuals, for Bergson, are both self-knowing and equipped with the means by which they attempt to know ‘every other object’. Within the context of continually becoming, as a researcher we need to consider our methodology carefully and take into account our body’s capability to work as a communicative, deciphering tool engaged throughout the research process. In the humanities, researchers often engage directly with human subjects as participants or fellow researchers, who may be providing personal experiences and reflections that become primary data. During this exchange, as information is being articulated and collected, the body of the researcher and the bodies of the participants both transmit and receive affect (Brennan 2004) creating ‘affect relations’ (Massumi 1995) in and between them. These relations will either augment or diminish both the researcher’s and the participants’ ability to act, and therefore can serve or limit the unfolding production of meaning (Spinoza 1996).
Affect relations are always and already being activated within and through all human experiences. Therefore, when gathering data and translating experiences into operative knowledge as researchers, we need to be cognisant of our receptive and transmitting body. The embodiment of knowing through feeling and the capacity to feel and draw meaning from our experience is always imbued with inherent patterns prompted by our feelings and our tendencies. According to Massumi (2015, p. 48), when we shift from one affective state to another, or “from one state of capacitation to a diminished or augmented state of capacitation”, we understand the transition through our feeling body. In these transitions “a distinction is asserted between two levels, one of which is feeling and the other capacitation or activation” (p. 48). The complexity of influences impacting our feeling-thinking bodies is “incomprehensible in one go” (2015, p. 2), often leaving us feeling uncertain about our experience and/or response. This uncertainty gives “a margin of manoeuvrability and you focus on that, rather than on projecting success or failure” (p. 2). Having the ability to manoeuvre means taking time to appreciate more than the obvious; time to investigate the more-than possibilities.
For what can this useless fringe be, if not that part of the evolving principle which has not shrunk to the peculiar form of our organisation, but has settled around it unasked for, unwanted? It is there accordingly, that we must look for hints to expand the intellectual form of our thought; from there shall we derive the impetus necessary to lift us above ourselves. (2014, p. 49)
Spinoza (1996) suggests that we initially have “incomplete” or “inadequate” ideas because we cannot know all there is to know from a transmitting or corresponding body; we cannot understand fully the affective and cognitive field within which this (other) body is both situated and becoming. We are therefore constantly striving for our ideas to become ‘more adequate’ to establish more than what is initially known and/or intellectually perceived. One of the ways in which we can address this deficit is by obtaining further contextual information, including that which may question our assumptions regarding the cause of things. We need to strive to understand the fullness of the back-story, including both affective and cognitive narratives, for our ideas to be more adequate. In learning about contextual relevance, we become more aware and accepting of difference and therefore inclusive of ‘other’. To think in this way invites a re-thinking of assumptions and in particular values and opinions which will manifest through habitual thinking, dogmas and egos if not checked. During the negotiations zigzagging between the body and the mind, our thought patterns can be jolted or gently persuaded into accepting change, realising a new or different viewpoint and/or concept. For this to happen we need to be cognisant of the causes of things not just the effect. We need to be able to establish what Deleuze calls a ‘difference in kind’ rather than just a ‘difference in degree’ (Deleuze 1991, p. 14). I also think of the concept of difference being applicable where “even if things might be conceived as having shared attributes allowing them to be labelled as being of the same kind, Deleuze’s conception of difference seeks to privilege the individual difference between them” (Stagoll 2005, p. 74). If we think of how we perceive difference, it is often by using comparative skills to prove that the difference exists, and that difference is referenced through means of a binary or linear thinking and is “understood in terms of resemblance, identity, opposition and analogy” (2005, p. 75). Bigger or smaller, alike but different, are examples of linear thinking that can easily lead to prejudiced judgements that fail to privilege “the individual difference between them” (p. 74).As researchers we need to be able to apprehend the differences between cultures, genders, practices, individuals and states of becoming in a way that values the history, reasoning and approach belonging to the culture, gender, practice, individual and state of becoming.
The same elements existing in flows, strata and assemblages can be organised in a molar or a molecular mode. The molar order corresponds to signification that delimits objects, subjects, representations and their reference systems. Whereas the molecular order is that of flows, becomings, phase transitions and intensities.
If we are to grow ourselves then the inclusion of new methods and methodologies in our research processes will result in molecular thinking and be of benefit to our growth and maturation as human beings within a forever changing globalised world. Alternatively, if research is carried out in the most expedient manner to provide outcomes for an external neoliberal mandate, we run the risk of remaining within our molar thinking patterns and perhaps working more with ‘false problems’ than authentic enquiry. Consequently, we may not experience how the contextualisation of observed simple practices can impact on our understanding and thinking of such practices and how this reaching into discover more creates a series of more adequate ideas.
Correspondence between the transmitting body and the receiving body can be honed and cultivated by building greater capacity for recognising affect relations and their associated cognitive processes. This means building not only the awareness of the body and its capacity to feel but also the nuanced language that can express the complexity of the body’s felt sensations. Being able to feel and think and articulate the manner in which we are being affected reveals to us a contextual understanding of how we are in relation, particularly in response and relation to the unfamiliar. As we practise articulating our feelings by massaging the connection between our affective experience and our cognitive thought processes, our vocabulary for both felt and spoken expression expands. With this expansion our ideas about how we are in relation with other are explored and contextualised and therefore become more adequate. Through these acts we begin to understand the selection process that occurs within our personal cache of available impulses and tendencies as we assign a value to the subject, object or event in question. Since we are always and already becoming and our position is never fixed, when presented with a means to question our habitual response we can find ourselves capable of further enquiry in search of greater contextual knowing. With greater understanding we can make better choices. We could think of this transition as embracing what we are not sure about and benefitting from the associated manoeuvrability that will manifest through uncertainty.
These finely tuned responses regarding affective and cognitive processes are indicative of and influence our own becoming. As we contemplate different perspectives and reap contextual understanding, we can gain new ideas and examples that enrich thinking and carry innovative and novel ideas to fruition. Within this process, we must also pay attention to the cause of any effect we are wanting to consider or translate as usable data within a research project. This includes material data, experiential data and affective data. In other words, we need to identify to the best of our ability what Spinoza (1996) calls the ‘false problems’ that may lie within the relevant causes and our contextual comprehension. In doing so we can become cognisant of how we can develop our initial and inadequate ideas into more adequate ones, and as researchers employ more ethical processes within our research engagement.
Conclusion
Before the affective turn and the use of poststructural methodologies, research methods over-emphasised quantitative data at the expense of acknowledging and valuing situational and personal affect relations. By not accounting for feelings, researchers misunderstood the body’s ability to work in symbiosis with the mind as meaning is determined. Spinoza recognised this symbiotic relation, which he called ‘parallelism’, in the seventeenth-century. Nevertheless, until the advent of poststructuralist philosophy in the twentieth century, scientistic thought ignored this vital relationship, prioritising instead rational thought, assuming a mind-over-body hierarchy. Consequently, organisational structures, methodical intellectual processes and verifiable data have traditionally been valued over affective and instinctual knowing. As researchers, we must be willing to explore the contextuality from which difference in kind emerges. By doing so we can implement appropriate methods of inquiry whereby differences can not only be recognised but also evaluated through appropriate contextual understanding. A methodology based on affect relations and the unfolding and sharing of knowledge uses immediacy and intuition to capture and duration to verify. Affections (sensations) are then used to guide movement, timing and direction. As simple as it may seem, when we slow down and feel each moment, and enable the fullness of what is present to unfold, we can comprehend a fuller contextual knowing and thereby obtain a greater depth of understanding. By carrying out research in this manner we can more easily distinguish worthy problems from false problems and not waste time on presenting irrelevant or false solutions. The significance of this methodological approach is that it values human beings as feeling-thinking beings and makes use of the intelligence embedded in our corporeality. As qualitative researchers we can be cognisant of our holistic body—our affective transmitting and receiving body—so as to hone the relational aspect of encounters with our body-mind capability. We need to be aware that our feelings impact our thoughts and that this internal relation in turn impacts the quality of our external affective relationships. These skills can be applied in every phase of a research project, especially when we are in receipt of vital information or engaged in affective experiences that we intuitively understand as significant.